Certain regions of the human brain are activated both during action execution and action observation. This so-called 'mirror neuron system' has been proposed to enable an observer to understand an action through a process of internal motor simulation. Although there has been much speculation about the existence of such a system from early in life, to date there is little direct evidence that young infants recruit brain areas involved in action production during action observation. To address this question, we identified the individual frequency range in which sensorimotor alpha-band activity was attenuated in nine-month-old infants' electroencephalographs (EEGs) during elicited reaching for objects, and measured whether activity in this frequency range was also modulated by observing others' actions. We found that observing a grasping action resulted in motor activation in the infant brain, but that this activity began prior to observation of the action, once it could be anticipated. These results demonstrate not only that infants, like adults, display overlapping neural activity during execution and observation of actions, but that this activation, rather than being directly induced by the visual input, is driven by infants' understanding of a forthcoming action. These results provide support for theories implicating the motor system in action prediction.

Multisensory information has been shown to facilitate learning (Bahrick & Lickliter, 2000; Broadbent, White, Mareschal, & Kirkham, 2017; Jordan & Baker, 2011; Shams & Seitz, 2008). However, although research has examined the modulating effect of unisensory and multisensory distractors on multisensory processing, the extent to which a concurrent unisensory or multisensory cognitive load task would interfere with or support multisensory learning remains unclear. This study examined the role of concurrent task modality on incidental category learning in 6- to 10-year-olds. Participants were engaged in a multisensory learning task while also performing either a unisensory (visual or auditory only) or multisensory (audiovisual) concurrent task (CT). We found that engaging in an auditory CT led to poorer performance on incidental category learning compared with an audiovisual or visual CT, across groups. In 6-year-olds, category test performance was at chance in the auditory-only CT condition, suggesting auditory concurrent tasks may interfere with learning in younger children, but the addition of visual information may serve to focus attention. These findings provide novel insight into the use of multisensory concurrent information on incidental learning. Implications for the deployment of multisensory learning tasks within education across development and developmental changes in modality dominance and ability to switch flexibly across modalities are discussed.

Multisensory tools are commonly employed within educational settings (e.g. Carter & Stephenson, ), and there is a growing body of literature advocating the benefits of presenting children with multisensory information over unisensory cues for learning (Baker & Jordan, ; Jordan & Baker, ). This is even the case when the informative cues are only arbitrarily related (Broadbent, White, Mareschal, & Kirkham, ). However, the delayed retention of learning following exposure to multisensory compared to unisensory cues has not been evaluated, and has important implications for the utility of multisensory educational tools. This study examined the retention of incidental categorical learning in 5-, 7- and 9-year-olds (N = 181) using either unisensory or multisensory cues. Results found significantly greater retention of learning following multisensory cue exposure than with unisensory information when category knowledge was tested following a 24-hour period of delay. No age-related changes were found, suggesting that multisensory information can facilitate the retention of learning across this age range.

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The current study investigates whether informative, mutually redundant audiovisual cues supports better performance in a category learning paradigm. Research suggests that, under some conditions, redundant multisensory cues supports better learning, when compared with unisensory cues. This was examined systematically across two experiments. In Experiment 1, children aged 5-, 7-and 10-years were allocated to one of the three 'modality' conditions (audio informative only, visual informative only, and audiovisual informative) and explicitly instructed to learn the category membership of individual exemplars, as determined by a threshold of correct responses. Unisensory or redundant multisensory cues determined category membership, depending on the learning condition. In addition to significant main effects of age group and condition, a significant interaction between age and sensory condition was found, with five-year-olds performing better when presented with redundant multisensory cues compared to unisensory cues. 10-year-olds performed better with auditory informative only cues, compared to visual informative only cues, or informative but redundant multisensory cues, with no significant difference between the latter two. In Experiment 2, the multisensory condition was presented to separate groups of 5-, 7-, and 10-year-olds, examining explicit learning outcomes in the audiovisual informative condition. Results showed that children who reached threshold during training were faster, made fewer errors, and performed better during test trials.Learning appeared to be based on the visual informative cues. Findings are discussed in the context of age-related selective attention, suggesting that the value of providing multisensory informative cues to support real-world learning depends on age and instructional context. .