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 (Parraga et al., 2000; Simoncelli, 2003). For example, in adults, visual sensitivity to different hues shows an asymmetry which coincides with the statistical regularities of colour in the natural world (Bosten et al., 2015). Infants are sensitive to statistical regularities in social and linguistic stimuli, but whether or not infants’ visual systems are tuned to natural scene statistics is currently unclear. We measured colour discrimination in infants to investigate whether or not the visual system can represent chromatic scene statistics in very early life. 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.