Perceiving bimodally specified events in infancy.

Elizabeth S. Spelke

296 citations0/0 files storedDevelopmental Psychology

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Multisensory perception and integration Neuroscience and Music Perception Child and Animal Learning Development

Abstract

Four-month-old infants can perceive bimodally specified events. They respond to relationships between the optic and acoustic stimulation that carries information about an object. Infants can do this by detecting the temporal synchrony of an object's sounds and its optically specified impacts. They are sensitive both to the common tempo and to the simultaneity of such sounds and visible impacts. These findings support the view that intermodal perception depends at least in part on the detection of invariant relationships in patterns of light and sound. Humans live in a world of objects and events that can be seen, heard, and felt. When mature perceivers look and listen to an event simultaneously, they experience a unitary episode. When they look at one event while listening to another, they are aware of two separate happenings. These experiences are possible because adults can determine if simultaneous patterns of light and sound are produced by a single object. Adults can perceive bimodally specified events. What are the origins of this capacity? Many philosophers and psychologists have suggested that it arises from experience. Perceivers come to relate visual and auditory sensations through direct association (Berkeley, 1709/1910; Birch & Lefford, 1967; Mill, 1829), verbal mediation (Blank & Bridger, 1964), or the integration of schemes for look-Portions of this research are based on a thesis submitted

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 296 citations exist upstream.

References

1952The origins of intelligence in children.1969The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems 1948Analysis of the phenomena of the human mind, 1829.2019an essay towards a new theory of vision

Cited by

1996Perception of auditory-visual temporal synchrony in human infants.1998Intersensory Redundancy Facilitates Learning of Arbitrary Relations between Vowel Sounds and Objects in Seven-Month-Old Infants 2003Intersensory Redundancy Guides Early Perceptual and Cognitive Development 2001The Role of Person Familiarity in Young Infants' Perception of Emotional Expressions 1988Intermodal Learning in Infancy: Learning on the Basis of Two Kinds of Invariant Relations in Audible and Visible Events 2000Methods for assessing children's syntax . Ed. by Dana McDaniel, Cecile McKee, and Helen Smith Cairns. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Pp. xviii, 390. Cloth $49.50, paper $20.00.2002Intersensory redundancy facilitates discrimination of tempo in 3‐month‐old infants 1983Infant Intermodal Speech Perception Is a Left-Hemisphere Function

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.