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Visual perception in adult humans is thought to be optimised to represent the statistical regularities of natural scenes (Parraga et al., 2000; Simoncelli, 2003). For example, in adults, visual sensitivity to different hues shows an asymmetry which coincides with the statistical regularities of colour in the natural world (Bosten et al., 2015). Infants are sensitive to statistical regularities in social and linguistic stimuli, but whether or not infants’ visual systems are tuned to natural scene statistics is currently unclear. We measured colour discrimination in infants to investigate whether or not the visual system can represent chromatic scene statistics in very early life. Our results reveal the earliest association between vision and natural scene statistics that has yet been found: even as young as four months of age, colour vision is aligned with the distributions of colours in natural scenes.

Research Highlights

1. We find infants’ hue sensitivity is aligned with the distribution of colours in the natural world, as it is in adults

2. At just 4 months, infants’ visual systems are tailored to extract and represent the statistical regularities of the natural world

3. This points to a drive for the human brain to represent statistical regularities even at a young age.