Sense of symmetry at an incredibly young age

The human brain is amazingly well trained to grasp symmetries in abstract visual patterns. Experiments show how early we are able to recognize them.

These experiments have been carried out within the framework of a study led by the international team of Irene de la Cruz-Pavía, from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU).

Cruz-Pavía and colleagues have examined the spontaneous gaze patterns of 7-month-old infants in mosaic-like sequences with a symmetric and asymmetric structure.

The results show that these babies quickly detect whether a mosaic has a symmetric structure, suggesting a robust and automatic ability to extract structure from complex images.

In other words, seven-month-old babies already have a sense of symmetry.

The research team examined the spontaneous gaze patterns of almost 100 babies in the face of mosaic-like sequences with symmetric and asymmetric structures.

These mosaics were made up of square tiles from two categories (A and B) that differed in their color palette and internal shape. These tiles were arranged creating mosaics with symmetrical structures (for example ABA, ABABA) or asymmetrical structures (for example AAB, AABBA). In the study they have confirmed that the babies “discriminated the structurally symmetric tiles from the asymmetric ones, and that the length of the sequence (3 or 5 tiles) or the level of symmetry did not significantly modulate their behavior”. These results suggest that babies quickly detect structural symmetry in complex visual patterns: “7-month-old babies have a robust and automatic ability to detect that a structure is symmetrical. This ability coincides with those found in studies that we have carried out with other stimuli such as sign language or speech, showing that babies are simply very good at detecting structures and regularities”, says the researcher from the Department of Linguistics and Basque Studies of the UPV/EHU.

7-month-old babies have a robust and automatic ability to detect symmetrical structures. (Image: Irene de la Cruz-Pavía. UPV/EHU)

“The grammar of a language is the set of structures and rules of a language. I want to understand to what extent babies’ abilities to extract structures, and detect regularities and learn rules, are specific to language or if instead they are found in other areas —says the Ikerbasque researcher—. We have done this study with information that is visual but not language. With these mosaics, we have been able to see the ability of babies to extract structure from different media.”

The researchers emphasize that this study allows them to better understand “what are the fundamental skills of these babies, which will allow them to start first with certain more accessible parts of grammar and build little by little until they have something as complex as the grammar of a language. What we want to understand is what are the fundamental abilities that babies have to detect structure.”

“We have many more questions to answer,” they conclude. In this study we have been able to determine that babies are able to detect structures spontaneously and quickly. Now we want to understand when this ability starts, and understand to what degree of detail they analyze that structure and what aspects of the tiles allow them to detect its structure (shape, color, both…)”.

The results of the study have been made public through the academic journal PLoS ONE. The reference of the work is the following: De la Cruz-Pavía I, Westphal-Fitch G, Fitch WT, Gervain J (2022) Seven-month-old infants detect symmetrical structures in multi-featured abstract visual patterns. PLoS ONE 17(5): e0266938.

This study has been carried out in collaboration with the Center for Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition, dependent on the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the University of Paris, all these entities in France, as well as with the University of Vienna in Austria and with the University of Padua in Italy. (Source: UPV/EHU)