Brain imaging of very young children has been used to assess their ability to project anticipations onto the outside world and to emit error signals when these predictions are violated. When a baby of a few months old is presented with a series of sounds " ba ba ba ba " followed by an identical (ba) or deviant (ga) sound, the child's brain, like that of an adult, reacts by emitting an evoked potential specific to the new stimuli(mismatch response). This response, which reflects the detection of a deviation from an auditory regularity, is present even in sleeping newborns, and in premature infants of six and a half months' gestation. It therefore reflects an elementary and probably unconscious calculation of probabilities.
The auditory regularities to which babies are sensitive are not trivial, but provide evidence of a hierarchy of abstract inferences. After repeated exposure to the sight of a mouth that is mute, but whose movement clearly articulates the sound " a ", the auditory cortex of a ten-week-old baby responds to the auditory novelty of the sound " i " compared to the sound " a " (Bristow et al., 2009 ). Distinct regions of his brain respond to the change in voice and phoneme. The baby also responds distinctly to local and global changes in a sequence of sounds - a test supposed to measure the access of auditory information to consciousness. Finally, faced with a rotating face, the extraction of statistical regularities enables the child to learn that the profile and the front view belong to the same face. Shimon Ullman shows that a simple algorithm, exposed to an hour's worth of videos, automatically extracts the presence of hands and faces (S. Ullman, Harari & Dorfman, 2012).
