2024-05-23 マサチューセッツ工科大学(MIT)
<関連情報>
- https://news.mit.edu/2024/study-explains-why-brain-robustly-recognizes-images-even-without-color-0523
- https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk9587
幼少期の視覚経験が後の色彩手がかりの使用に与える影響 Impact of early visual experience on later usage of color cues
MARIN VOGELSANG, LUKAS VOGELSANG, PRITI GUPTA, TAPAN K. GANDHI, […], AND PAWAN SINHA
Science Published:23 May 2024
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adk9587
Editor’s summary
Humans have excellent color vision, but visual recognition is also highly resilient to chromatic changes. How is this resilience generated during development? Vogelsang et al. focused on the impact of neonatal visual experience, analyzing recognition performance in 10 congenitally blind children who gained sight later in life (see the Perspective by Mamassian). The late-sighted children showed reduced resilience to color removal compared with born-sighted children. Control experiments and in silico simulations suggested that the immature grayscale vision that born-sighted children experienced at the neonatal stage facilitates color-independent recognition later in life. By experiencing color vision from the very beginning, late-sighted children likely rely more on colors than their age-matched counterparts. —Mattia Maroso
Abstract
Human visual recognition is remarkably robust to chromatic changes. In this work, we provide a potential account of the roots of this resilience based on observations with 10 congenitally blind children who gained sight late in life. Several months or years following their sight-restoring surgeries, the removal of color cues markedly reduced their recognition performance, whereas age-matched normally sighted children showed no such decrement. This finding may be explained by the greater-than-neonatal maturity of the late-sighted children’s color system at sight onset, inducing overly strong reliance on chromatic cues. Simulations with deep neural networks corroborate this hypothesis. These findings highlight the adaptive significance of typical developmental trajectories and provide guidelines for enhancing machine vision systems.
