Spring 2008 Colloquia

     Objects and events can be simultaneously seen, heard, smelled, and felt as we interact with our environment.

• How are objects and events experienced as unitary when they stimulate receptors that give rise to different forms of information?
  
  
• How are different modes of sensory stimulation bound together?
  
  
• How do infants determine which sights, sounds, tastes, and smells belong together and constitute unitary events, and which are unrelated?

     Adults can use prior knowledge about objects and events to guide their attention to meaningful, unitary aspects of stimulation. Experienced perceivers know that faces go with voices, that the sounds of footsteps foretell the approach of a person, and that the breaking glass made the sharp crashing sound. How does the infant, who begins life with no prior knowledge to guide attention, make sense of this flow and focus on stimulation that is meaningful, unitary, and relevant? In this presentation I will describe a series of studies addressing the nature of this sensory coordination in human infants, its relationship to early memory, and whether infants’ intersensory perception extends to non-human faces and vocalizations.

• Bahrick L, Lickliter R, Flom R, (2004) Intersensory redundancy guides the development of selective attention, perception, and cognition in infancy, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13, 3, 99:102
  download 77kb pdf
  
  
• Flom R, Bahrick L, (2007) The development of infant discrimination of affect in multimodal and unimodal stimulation: the role of intersensory redundancy, Developmental Psychology 43, 1, 238:252
  download 256kb pdf