ReviewTrends in cognitive sciences2024
Helpless infants are learning a foundation model.
Review in Trends in cognitive sciences, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Self-supervised learning yields representational signatures of category-selective cortex.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Reading hominin life history in fossil bones and teeth: methods to test hypotheses regarding its evolution.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2026Review
- Rethinking category-selectivity in human visual cortex.Cognitive neuroscience · 2026Review
- Infants have rich visual categories in ventrotemporal cortex at 2 months of age.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Functional organization of the human visual system at birth and across late gestation.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Cooperative Breeding as a Likely Early Catalyst of Human Evolution.Evolutionary anthropology · 2025Review
- Fast and robust visual object recognition in young children.Science advances · 2025Article
- Longitudinal trajectories of brain development from infancy to school age and their relationship with literacy development.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Longitudinal trajectories of brain development from infancy to school age and their relationship to literacy development.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Postnatal dependency as the foundation of social learning in humans.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Review
- From Circuits to Lifespan: Translating Mouse and Human Timelines with Neuroimaging-Based Tractography.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Translating time: Challenges, progress, and future directions.Brain research bulletin · 2025Review
- Typical and disrupted small-world architecture and regional communication in full-term and preterm infants.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- From circuits to lifespan: translating mouse and human timelines with neuroimaging based tractography.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Humans have a protracted postnatal helplessness period, typically attributed to human-specific maternal constraints causing an early birth when the brain is highly immature. By aligning neurodevelopmental events across species, however, it has been found that humans are not born with especially immature brains compared with animal species with a shorter helpless period. Consistent with this, the rapidly growing field of infant neuroimaging has found that brain connectivity and functional activation at birth share many similarities with the mature brain. Inspired by machine learning, where deep neural networks also benefit from a 'helpless period' of pre-training, we propose that human infants are learning a foundation model: a set of fundamental representations that underpin later cognition with high performance and rapid generalisation.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.