Perception of visual and audiovisual trajectories towards and away from the body in the first year of life.

Abstract

Perceiving motion in depth is important in everyday life, especially motion in relation to the body. Visual and auditory cues inform us about motion in space when presented in isolation from each other, but the most comprehensive information is obtained through the combination of both such cues. We traced the development of infants’ ability to discriminate between visual motion trajectories across peripersonal space and to match these with auditory cues specifying the same peripersonal motion. We measured 5-month-old (n=20) and 9-month-old (n=20) infants’ visual preferences for visual motion towards or away from their body (presented simultaneously and side-by-side) across three conditions: i) visual displays presented alone, ii) paired with a sound increasing in intensity, iii) paired with a sound decreasing in intensity. Both groups preferred approaching motion in the visual only condition. When the visual displays were paired with a sound increasing in intensity neither group showed a visual preference. When a sound decreasing in intensity was played, instead, the 5-month-olds preferred the receding (spatiotemporally congruent) visual stimulus, while the 9-month-olds preferred the approaching (spatiotemporally incongruent) visual stimulus. We speculate that in the approaching sound condition the behavioural salience of the sound could have led infants to focus on the auditory information alone, to prepare a motor response, and to neglect the visual stimuli. In the receding sound condition, instead, the difference in response patterns in the two groups may have been driven by infants’ emerging motor abilities and their developing predictive processing mechanisms supporting and influencing each other.