Motion's privilege in recognizing facial expressions following treatment for blindness.

In his 1872 monograph, Charles Darwin posited that "… the habit of expressing our feelings by certain movements, though now rendered innate, had been in some manner gradually acquired." Nearly 150 years later, researchers are still teasing apart innate versus experience-dependent contributions to expression recognition. Indeed, studies have shown that face detection is surprisingly resilient to early visual deprivation, pointing to plasticity that extends beyond dogmatic critical periods.

Face-specific identification impairments following sight-providing treatment may be alleviated by an initial period of low visual acuity.

Identifying faces requires configural processing of visual information. We previously proposed that the poor visual acuity experienced by newborns in their first year of life lays the groundwork for such configural processing by forcing integration over larger spatial fields. This hypothesis predicts that children treated for congenital cataracts late in life will exhibit persistent impairments in face- but not object-identification, because they begin their visual journey with higher than newborn acuity.

The influence of semantics on long-term visual memory capacity in children and adults.

Human visual memory capacity has a rapid developmental progression. Here we examine whether image semantics modulate this progression. We assessed the performance of children (6-14 years) and young adults (19-36 years) on a visual memory task using real-world (or meaningful) as well as abstract image sets, which were matched in low-level image attributes.

Impact of early visual experience on later usage of color cues.

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.

Robustness to Transformations Across Categories: Is Robustness Driven by Invariant Neural Representations?

Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have demonstrated impressive robustness to recognize objects under transformations (e.g., blur or noise) when these transformations are included in the training set.