Simulating Infant Senses with Age-Tuned Networks

Overview & Synopsis

What a newborn sees, hears and feels, and how this changes month by month, has been measured sense by sense, with different methods and in different units. We bring these measurements together for the first two years of life and ask whether small neural networks tuned to a given age can turn them into a quick, inspectable simulation of sensory perception. Each sense's immaturity is written as a fixed, age-indexed filter on the input, and a small prediction network learns behind it over the first year. The filters alone reproduce the order in which the senses mature, by construction. The networks add what filters cannot: in vision they extract far less than their input allows at early stages (at the newborn stage a toy's position cannot be read out, $R^2 = 0.00$, against 0.57 for a network trained directly on the same input), and a critical period and perceptual narrowing emerge without being built in; in hearing they track what their input allows. The same filters drive the Baby Senses Lab, a free website that shows a user's own images and sounds as a baby of a chosen age might sense them. It is a research and teaching tool, not a diagnostic test.