Neuroemergence and the Screen Generation

"One of the first things a newborn does is track faces. Within minutes of birth, infants will turn their heads toward simple arrangements of dark shapes that resemble eyes and a mouth. This early sensitivity is not learned. It is a built-in system that gives the infant a starting point for understanding the world. Mark Johnson and his colleagues call this system CONSPEC."

"In Mastery, I described this as the "primal sketch" of human vision. These early fixations begin a perceptual cascade that helps humans lean into a world filled with visual complexity. The first months are spent tracking faces, before we shift our attention to objects, before eventually linking objects with sounds. It is the primal sketch, the scaffold of a rich visual category system that supports everything from spatial reasoning to literacy."

Newborns possess an innate face-tracking system called CONSPEC that orients attention to face-like patterns within minutes of birth. Early face fixations initiate a perceptual cascade that prioritizes faces, then objects, then multisensory links, forming a foundational visual category scaffold. A study of adults who had congenital cataracts removed in infancy shows brief early visual deprivation can cause lasting deficits in primary visual cortex processing of basic features. Higher-level ventral occipito-temporal regions recognizing faces and objects can develop via later experience, but early altered input, including modern screen exposure, may not engage ancestral face-detection pathways properly.

Read at Psychology Today