The development of infant discrimination of affect in multimodal and unimodal stimulation: The role of intersensory redundancy.

Abstract

This research examined the developmental course of infants' ability to perceive affect in bimodal (audiovisual) and unimodal (auditory and visual) displays of a woman speaking. According to the intersensory redundancy hypothesis (L. E. Bahrick, R. Lickliter, & R. , detection of amodal properties is facilitated in multimodal stimulation and attenuated in unimodal stimulation. Later in development, however, attention becomes more flexible, and amodal properties can be perceived in both multimodal and unimodal stimulation. The authors tested these predictions by assessing 3-, 4-, 5-, and 7-month-olds' discrimination of affect. Results demonstrated that in bimodal stimulation, discrimination of affect emerged by 4 months and remained stable across age. However, in unimodal stimulation, detection of affect emerged gradually, with sensitivity to auditory stimulation emerging at 5 months and visual stimulation at 7 months. Further temporal synchrony between faces and voices was necessary for younger infants' discrimination of affect. Across development, infants first perceive affect in multimodal stimulation through detecting amodal properties, and later their perception of affect is extended to unimodal auditory and visual stimulation. Implications for social development, including joint attention and social referencing, are considered. Keywords infant perception; intersensory redundancy; intersensory perception; multimodal perception; emotion perception Young infants and adults perceive a world of unitary and cohesive objects and events even though they encounter a continuously changing array of visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and tactile stimulation. The information available to the sensory systems that specifies properties of objects and events is of two kinds: amodal and modality specific. Amodal information (e.g., texture, rhythm, tempo, and intensity) is not specific to one sense modality as it can be conveyed redundantly across multiple sense modalities (J. J. Gibson, 1966Gibson, , 1979. In contrast, information that is modality specific (e.g., color, visual pattern, pitch, etc.) is specific to a single sense modality and cannot be conveyed redundantly across multiple sense modalities. Most events, such as a bouncing ball, provide both modality-specific and amodal information. That is, the ball provides color and pattern information that can only be specified visually and amodal information such as the tempo and rhythm of the bounces that can be redundantly specified in acoustic as well as visual stimulation.Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to Ross Flom, Department of Psychology, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT 84602. E-mail: E-mail: flom@byu.edu. A portion of these data was presented at the Society for Research in Child Development, Tampa, Florida, April 2003. NIH Public Access NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author ManuscriptResearchers have demonstrated that one of the earliest and perhaps most important perceptual competencies is infants' sen...

Intersensory redundancy accelerates preverbal numerical competence

“…For example, the greater amount of information provided through multisensory stimulation could increase infants' general arousal and provide them with more information through which to compare numerical values. To discount this hypothesis, prior studies asking whether intersensory redundancy enhances cognitive, perceptual, and even social development have run control conditions in which asynchronous or non-redundant multisensory information is presented to the infant (i.e., Bahrick and Lickliter, 2000;Flom and Bahrick, 2007;Lickliter et al, 2002Lickliter et al, , 2004. In all such situations, infants fail to discriminate the property being tested unless it is synchronously and redundantly specified across multiple modalities.…”

Automatic facial mimicry in response to dynamic emotional stimuli in five-month-old infants

“…Previous developmental studies of emotion recognition reported that emotion recognition is initially promoted in naturalistic, multimodal conditions and that this ability is later extended to auditory and visual unimodal conditions [28,29]. For example, a study by Flom et al [29] revealed that fourmonth-old infants discriminate happy, sad and angry emotions through audiovisual bimodal stimulations, but that sensitivity to auditory stimuli emerges at five months and that to visual stimuli emerges at seven months.…”

“…For example, a study by Flom et al [29] revealed that fourmonth-old infants discriminate happy, sad and angry emotions through audiovisual bimodal stimulations, but that sensitivity to auditory stimuli emerges at five months and that to visual stimuli emerges at seven months. This notion is also supported by event-related potential studies [43].…”

“…Past studies on emotion recognition have proposed that infants first become able to discriminate emotions from audiovisual bimodal stimuli, and later this ability expands to unimodal auditory and visual stimuli [28,29]. We speculated that the consistent developmental sequence might be present in the mimicry domain, in which four-to five-month-old infants would demonstrate facial mimicry to audiovisual emotional displays, but may not to unimodal stimuli.…”

“…This study therefore examined young infants' facial EMG activities in response to others' emotional expressions. We focused particularly on four-to five-montholds because it has been suggested that infants start to discriminate several emotions around this age [28,29], and we speculated that automatic motor responses to others' emotions would become differentiated with a similar developmental sequence of emotion recognition.…”