The decline of cross-species intersensory perception in human infants (original) (raw)

The emergence of multisensory systems through perceptual narrowing

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2009

According to conventional wisdom, multisensory development is a progressive process that results in the growth and proliferation of perceptual skills. We review new findings indicating that a regressive processperceptual narrowingalso contributes in critical ways to perceptual development. These new data reveal that young infants are able to integrate non-native faces and vocalizations, that this broad multisensory perceptual tuning is present at birth, and that this tuning narrows by the end of the first year of life, leaving infants with the ability to integrate only socio-ecologicallyrelevant multisensory signals. This narrowing process forces us to reconsider the traditional progressive theories of multisensory development and opens up several new evolutionary questions as well.

Early Experience and Multisensory Perceptual Narrowing

Developmental Psychobiology, 2014

Perceptual narrowing reflects the effects of early experience and contributes in key ways to perceptual and cognitive development. Previous studies have found that unisensory perceptual sensitivity in young infants is broadly tuned such that they can discriminate native as well as non-native sensory inputs but that it is more narrowly tuned in older infants such that they only respond to native inputs. Recently, my coworkers and I discovered that multisensory perceptual sensitivity narrows as well. The present article reviews this new evidence in the general context of multisensory perceptual development and the effects of early experience. Together, the evidence on unisensory and multisensory narrowing shows that early experience shapes the emergence of perceptual specialization and expertise. ß 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol

Intersensory perception at birth: newborns match nonhuman primate faces and voices

Infancy, 2010

Previous studies have shown that infants, including newborns, can match previously unseen and unheard human faces and vocalizations. More recently, it has been reported that infants as young as 4 months of age also can match the faces and vocalizations of other species raising the possibility that such broad multisensory perceptual tuning is present at birth. To test this possiblity, we investigated whether newborns can match monkey facial and vocal gestures. Using a paired preference procedure, in Experiment 1 we presented pairs of different visible monkey calls in silence and then in the presence of one or the other corresponding audible call and compared preferences across the silent and in-sound conditions. In Experiment 2, we presented the same monkey visible calls but this time together with a tone analog of the natural calls in the in-sound trials. We found that newborns looked longer at the matching visible call in the in-sound condition than in the silent condition in both experiments. These findings indicate that multisensory perceptual tuning is so broad at birth that it enables newborns to integrate the facial and vocal gestures of other primates and that integration is based on newborns' detection of audiovisual temporal synchrony relations.

Heterogeneity and heterochrony in the development of intersensory perception

Cognitive Brain Research, 2002

It is now well established that a variety of intersensory perceptual skills emerge in early human development. Empirical evidence from studies in the author's as well as other laboratories charting the developmental emergence of these abilities is reviewed. The evidence is considered in terms of the currently dominant theoretical view of intersensory development that assigns the detection of amodal invariants a primary and foundational role. It is argued that this view is inadequate because the detection of amodal invariants is only one of three distinct intersensory integration processes. It is noted that the other two processes, namely, intersensory association of modality-specific cues and non-specific effects of stimulation in one modality on responsiveness to stimulation in another modality, are equally important and that the operation of all three and, in particular, the relation between them, must be studied to attain a complete understanding of intersensory perceptual development. It is suggested that the theoretical approach to the development of intersensory perception should be broadened to include all three types of processes and that developmental studies must respect basic facts and principles of development. To this end, a developmental systems approach is proposed that holds that the development of intersensory integration consists of the heterochronous emergence of heterogeneous perceptual skills.

Intersensory Perception of Faces and Voices in Infants

Integrating Face and Voice in Person Perception, 2012

This chapter describes and provides behavioral and neurophysiological evidence articulating how the intersensory redundancy hypothesis addresses the question of how infants integrate faces and voices in perceiving other people. Infants' learning of the arbitrary relationship between faces and voices occurs in two tightly coupled steps. First, between 3 and 5 months of age infants attend to various amodal properties such as a common tempo, rhythm, and affective expressions that unite a particular face and voice. Second, around 6 months of age, when infants' attention is more fl exible and they perceive amodal and modality-speci fi c properties, infants perceive and remember various arbitrary features (i.e., the sound of particular voice and the visual appearance of a particular face) associated with a particular face-voice pairing. Animals, including human infants, are adept at perceiving a world fi lled with a variety of objects, events, conspeci fi cs, as well as the occasional enemy. The question of how we, along with most other organisms, are able to detect the perceptual relationships between various sources of stimuli in arriving at a unitary and veridical perception of the world has long perplexed philosophy, psychology, and more recently neuroscience. One of the fi rst to address this question was William James (1890 , p. 159) who, citing Royce (1881 , p. 376), stated that A statue is an aggregation of particles of marble…For the spectator, however it is one; in itself it is an aggregate; just as, to the consciousness of an ant crawling over it, it may again appear a mere aggregate. While James agreed, at least in this instance, with Royce that objects and events, in the presence of a conscious observer are perceived as a whole. James was somewhat perplexed, however, at how we come to integrate these different sensory inputs Chapter 4

Intersensory Redundancy Guides Attentional Selectivity and Perceptual Learning In Infancy

Developmental Psychology, 2000

This study assessed an intersensory redundancy hypothesis, which holds that in early infancy information presented redundantly and in temporal synchrony across two sense modalities selectively recruits attention and facilitates perceptual differentiation more effectively than does the same information presented unimodally. Five-month-old infants' sensitivity to the amodal property of rhythm was examined in 3 experiments. Results revealed that habituation to a bimodal (auditory and visual) rhythm resulted in discrimination of a novel rhythm, whereas habituation to the same rhythm presented unimodally (auditory or visual) resulted in no evidence of discrimination. Also, temporal synchrony between the bimodal auditory and visual information was necessary for rhythm discrimination. These findings support an intersensory redundancy hypothesis and provide further evidence for the importance of redundancy for guiding and constraining early perceptual learning. The newborn infant encounters a world of objects and events that present a richly structured array of stimulation to all the senses. Recent research demonstrates that young infants are adept perceivers of this multimodal stimulation (see Lewkowicz & Lickliter, 1994; Rose & Ruff, 1987). Infants do not perceive disparate sensations through the various sense modalities; rather, they are able to select information that is meaningful and relevant to their actions and to perceive coherent, unitary multimodal events even in the first months of life. For example, 2to 5-month-old infants are able to perceive a relationship between a face and a voice on the basis of temporal synchrony, shared rhythm, and spectral information between the movements of the mouth and the timing and nature of the speech sounds (Dodd, 1979; Kuhl & Meltzoff, 1984; Mendelson & Ferland, 1982). By 5-7 months, infants can also match faces and voices on the basis of the age and gender of the speaker as well as the speaker's affective expression (Bahrick, Netto, & Hernandez-Reif, 1998; Walker-Andrews, 1982; Walker-Andrews, Bahrick, Raglioni, & Diaz, 1991). Infants of 3-6 months are also able to match a soundtrack to the appropriate one of two objects hitting a surface on the basis of the object's substance and composition (Bahrick, 1983, 1987, 1988, 1992). Although there is now a solid base of data demonstrating that infants are adept perceivers of multimodal stimulation across a variety of natural events, as yet little is currently known about how infants accomplish this. How and on what basis do infants begin to parse, perceive, and derive meaning from the flux of multimodal stimulation in a manner that lays a foundation for the perceptual world of the adult? Consistent with Gibson's (1969) invariant detection view, Bahrick (1992, 1994; Bahrick & Pickens, 1994) has proposed that amodal information initially guides this developmental process. Amodal information is information that is not specific to a particular sense modality