Visual attention is an information-gathering mechanism that supports the emergence of complex perceptual and cognitive capacities. Yet, little is known about how the infant brain learns to direct attention to information that is most relevant for learning and behavior. Here we address this gap by examining whether learning a hierarchical rule structure, where there is a higher-order feature that organizes visual inputs into predictable sequences, subsequently biases 9-month-old infants’ visual attention to the higher-order visual feature. In Experiment 1, we found that individual differences in infants’ ability to structure simple visual inputs into generalizable rules was related to the change in infants’ attention biases towards higher-order features. In Experiment 2, we found that increased functional connectivity between the PFC and visual cortex was related to the efficacy of rule learning. Moreover, Granger causality analyses provided exploratory evidence that increased functional connectivity reflected PFC influence over visual cortex. These findings provide new insights into how the infant brain learns to flexibly select features from the cluttered visual world that were previously relevant for learning and behavior.

视觉注意力是一种信息收集机制，可支持复杂的感知和认知能力的出现。然而，关于婴儿大脑如何学会将注意力转移到与学习和行为最相关的信息上，人们所知甚少。在这里，我们通过检查是否学习分级规则结构（存在一个将视觉输入组织成可预测序列的高阶特征，然后将9个月大婴儿的视觉注意力偏向于高阶视觉特征）来解决这一差距。在实验1中，我们发现婴儿将简单的视觉输入结构化为通用规则的能力的个体差异与婴儿对高阶特征的注意力偏向的改变有关。在实验2中，我们发现PFC和视觉皮层之间功能连接的增加与规则学习的功效有关。此外，格兰杰因果关系分析提供了探索性证据，表明功能连接性的增加反映了PFC对视觉皮层的影响。这些发现为婴儿大脑如何学习从杂乱的视觉世界中灵活选择以前与学习和行为相关的特征提供了新的见解。