# Do Blind Spots Matter for Word-Referent Mapping? A Computational Study with Infant Egocentric Video

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.11725 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11725/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [Self-Supervised Learning from Images with a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08243/) (2023)
- [VideoMAE V2: Scaling Video Masked Autoencoders with Dual Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16727/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Spatiotemporal Feature Learning: Speed-Accuracy Trade-offs in Video Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04851/) (2017)
- [Unmasked Teacher: Towards Training-Efficient Video Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16058/) (2023)
- [Self-supervised learning through the eyes of a child](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.16189/) (2020)
- [EgoObjects: A Large-Scale Egocentric Dataset for Fine-Grained Object Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08816/) (2023)
- [Learning high-level visual representations from a child's perspective without strong inductive biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15372/) (2023)
- [DevBench: A multimodal developmental benchmark for language learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10215/) (2024)
- [A systematic investigation of learnability from single child linguistic input](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07899/) (2024)
- [Self-supervised learning of video representations from a child's perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00300/) (2024)
- [A model of early word acquisition based on realistic-scale audiovisual naming events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05259/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Typically, children start to learn their first words between 6 and 9 months, linking spoken utterances to their visual referents. Without prior knowledge, a word encountered for the first time can be interpreted in countless ways; it might refer to any of the objects in the environment, their components, or attributes. Using longitudinal, egocentric, and ecologically valid data from the experience of one child, in this work, we propose a self-supervised and biologically plausible strategy to learn strong visual representations. Our masked autoencoder-based visual backbone incorporates knowledge about the blind spot in human eyes to define a novel masking strategy. This mask and reconstruct approach attempts to mimic the way the human brain fills the gaps in the eyes' field of view. This represents a significant shift from standard random masking strategies, which are difficult to justify from a biological perspective. The pretrained encoder is utilized in a contrastive learning-based video-text model capable of acquiring word-referent mappings. Extensive evaluation suggests that the proposed biologically plausible masking strategy is at least as effective as random masking for learning word-referent mappings from cross-situational and temporally extended episodes.