Babies as young as two months old can categorise objects in their brains much earlier than previously thought, according to new research.

The research comes from scientists at Queen’s University Belfast, Trinity College Dublin and Stanford University, who were assisted by the Coombe and Rotunda Hospitals in Dublin.

They used brain imaging and artificial intelligence models in their study of 130 two-month-old infants.

The babies were shown bright, colourful images for 15 to 20 minutes while lying on a comfy beanbag and wearing sound-cancelling headphones.

The scientists then used functional MRI to measure how their brains responded to pictures of 12 common visual categories such as a cat, bird, rubber duck, shopping cart and tree.

Artificial intelligence models were then used to characterise how the babies’ brains represented the different visual categories.

The study has been published in the journal Nature Neuroscience and was led by a team from Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience and the School of Psychology.

Dr Anna Truzzi, from Queen’s University Belfast and a co-author on the paper, said her daughter Maeve took part in the study when she was two months old.

“Until recently, we could not reliably measure how specific areas of the infant brain interpreted visual information. By combining AI and neuroimaging, our study offers a very unique insight, which helps us to understand much more about how babies learn in their first year of life,” she said.

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Dr Cliona O’Doherty, lead author on the study who conducted the research while in Trinity’s Cusack Lab, said: “Parents and scientists have long wondered what goes on in a baby’s mind and what they actually see when they view the world around them. This research highlights the richness of brain function in the first year of life.

“Although at two months, infants’ communication is limited by a lack of language and fine motor control, their minds were already not only representing how things look, but figuring out to which category they belonged. This shows that the foundations of visual cognition are already in place from very early on and much earlier than expected.”