Abstract
Human infants begin very early in life to take advantage of multisensory information by extracting the invariant amodal information that is conveyed redundantly by multiple senses. Here we addressed the question as to whether infants can bind multisensory moving stimuli, and whether this occurs even if the motion produced by the stimuli is only illusory. Three- to 4-month-old infants were presented with two bimodal pairings: visuo-tactile and audio-visual. Visuo-tactile pairings consisted of apparently vertically moving bars (the Barber Pole illusion) moving in either the same or opposite direction with a concurrent tactile stimulus consisting of strokes given on the infant’s back. Audio-visual pairings consisted of the Barber Pole illusion in its visual and auditory version, the latter giving the impression of a continuous rising or ascending pitch. We found that infants were able to discriminate congruently (same direction) vs. incongruently moving (opposite direction) pairs irrespective of modality (Experiment 1). Importantly, we also found that congruently moving visuo-tactile and audio-visual stimuli were preferred over incongruently moving bimodal stimuli (Experiment 2). Our findings suggest that very young infants are able to extract motion as amodal component and use it to match stimuli that only apparently move in the same direction.
Highlights
The past two decades have seen a growing interest in the development of multisensory processing, driven by studies suggesting that human infants, just like adults, begin very early in life to take advantage of multisensory information to better detect and discriminate events (Bahrick et al, 2004; Lewkowicz and Kraebel, 2004)
In order to overcome the limitations of previous literature, here we investigated whether infants can extract motion as amodal component across different sensory combinations, using visual and auditory stimuli in which motion is only apparent because induced by a perceptual illusion
The analysis revealed a main effect of Novelty, F(1,22) = 5.84, p = 0.02, η2 = 0.21, due to infants looking longer to the novel than familiar stimulus, in both visuo-tactile and audio-visual conditions (p = 0.18), and irrespective of type of habituation (p = 0.11)
Summary
The past two decades have seen a growing interest in the development of multisensory processing (e.g., see Bremner et al, 2012), driven by studies suggesting that human infants, just like adults, begin very early in life to take advantage of multisensory information to better detect and discriminate events (Bahrick et al, 2004; Lewkowicz and Kraebel, 2004). Visual-tactile correspondences are likely promoted by infant’s exploration of their own body, which represents the first and important source of multisensory stimulation, as infants continuously move and act on their own body by touching it and looking at it (Rochat, 1995). This has recently been corroborated by studies showing that newborns prefer to look at a baby face being synchronously stroked with their own face than asynchronously, suggesting that intersensory synchrony is fundamental for the development of body representation (Filippetti et al, 2013)
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