The Development of Object and Face Recognition
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this course on how infants and children learn to organize raw visual input into recognizable objects and faces. Starting from William James's description of early perception as a 'booming, buzzing confusion,' the syllabus works through key experimental findings and computational models that explain how coherent visual categories emerge over development. Readings and discussions cover infant looking-time studies, face perception research, and proposals for how the visual system bootstraps object recognition without much prior knowledge. Rather than only teaching conclusions, the course is structured to show students how researchers in developmental and cognitive science actually design and interpret experiments in this area. Materials include the reading list, discussion topics, and assignments as published by MIT, free to access with no certificate offered.