Gamma Oscillations and Object Processing in the Infant Brain

An enduring controversy in neuroscience concerns how the brain “binds ” to-gether separately coded stimulus features to form unitary representations of objects. Recent evidence has indicated a close link between this binding process and 40-hertz (gamma-band) oscillations generated by localized neural circuits. In a separate line of research, the ability of young infants to perceive objects as unitary and bounded has become a central focus for debates about the mechanisms of perceptual development. Here we demonstrate that binding-related 40-hertz oscillations are evident in the infant brain around 8 months of age, which is the same age at which behavioral and event-related potential evidence indicates the onset of perceptual binding of spatially separated static visual features. Our perception of coherent unified objects depends crucially on the brain’s ability to “bind ” together various features that are cod-ed by early stages of vision (1). One promis