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Colour vision is aligned with natural scene statistics at 4-months of age

Visual perception in adult humans is thought to be optimised to represent the statistical regularities of natural scenes (e.g. Parraga et al., 2000; Simoncelli, 2003). In infancy and early childhood, visual input is required to drive visual development (Berardi et al., 2000; Blakemore & Cooper, 1970; Jandó et al., 2012; Knudsen, 2004), but whether or not scene statistics are extracted and represented colour is currently unknown. In adults, visual sensitivity to different hues shows an asymmetry, which relates to the statistical regularity of colour in the natural world (Bosten et al., 2015). We measured colour discrimination in infants to investigate whether or not the visual system can in very early life represent scene statistics. Our results reveal the earliest association between vision and natural scene statistics that has yet been found: even as young as four months of age, colour vision is aligned with the distributions of colours in natural scenes. Research Highlights We find infants’ hue sensitivity is aligned with the distribution of colours in the natural world, as it is in adults At just 4-months, infants’ visual system is tailored to extract and represent the statistical regularities of the natural world This points to the fundamental drive for the human brain to attempt to optimally encode by representing statistical regularities even at a young age.