What neuroimaging methods can tell us about perceptual development

Over the past several decades, behavioral methods suitable for use with human infants have revealed detailed characteristics of perceptual development, but the causal mechanisms that drive these behavioral changes remain elusive. Neuroimaging methods hold the promise of clarifying these causal mechanisms by reducing the hypothesis space of theories for how biological and experiential factors interact as perceptual abilities emerge and become refined during early development. Here we review behavioral milestones in several key areas of perceptual development in infancy and childhood, summarize the potential value-added of neural measures, and highlight the promise of new analytic techniques that can further clarify these causal mechanisms in the future. We also outline patterns of interaction during development that describe how neural and behavioral findings change with age and raise some cautionary notes about how to interpret these interactions.