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Philosophers and psychologists have long debated the relative roles of built-in structure versus learning in the developing human mind. It is only recently that whole-brain measurements from awake infants have become available to inform these debates. First, Kosakowski will present data showing that preverbal infants’ brains distinguish faces, bodies, and scenes as distinct visual categories. Then, she will focus on faces to ask: do infants’ cortical face responses develop sequentially, first in perceptual regions followed by cognitive regions? Kosakowski will show that preverbal infants have face-selective responses in temporal and prefrontal regions, suggesting that cortical function develops in parallel and discuss the implications of these results. In the last part of her talk, Kosakowski will briefly present a study interrogating speech and music responses in infants’ brains. She will wrap-up by presenting ideas for how future studies can use fMRI to investigate infant brain function and uncover the origins of human perception and knowledge.

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