Development of Center-Surround Suppression in Infant Motion Processing

Motion direction of a large high-contrast pattern is more difficult to perceive than that of a small one [1]. This counterintuitive perceptual phenomenon is considered to reflect surround suppression, a receptive field property observed in the visual cortex [2-5]. Here, we demonstrate that this phenomenon can be observed in human infants. Infants at 7 to 8 months of age showed higher sensitivity for a small motion stimulus than for a large one. However, infants under 6 months showed the opposite result; motion sensitivity was higher for a large stimulus. These results suggest that suppressive surround regions beyond classical receptive fields develop in the second half of the first year. Moreover, we examined the size of spatial summation in infants and found that the spatial summation area shrinks from 3 to 8 months of age. Our findings suggest that the summation area for motion is broad with no surround suppression in early infancy and that it narrows and acquires suppressive surround regions in the first year of life, which might reflect the developmental changes in the receptive field structure.