Thirty-six 3-month-old infants interacted with their mothers under conditions in which they could see and hear their mothers (correlated auditory + visual information: A + V), see but not hear their mothers (visual information alone: V), and hear but not see their mothers (auditory information alone: A); the latter two conditions are termed perceptual paradox. The interactions were videotaped, and the infants' behavior was judged by naive observers who used a subjective 7-point rating scale of infant affect. For two groups of infants, three 1-minute presentations of the A + V condition were alternated with three 1-minute presentations of either A (Group 1) or V (Group 2) conditions. In both groups, infants were judged as being more distressed during unimodal presentations than during bimodal presentations. In a third group, unimodal (A) presentations were alternated with unimodal (V) presentations. Infants in this group were significantly more distressed when they could hear but not see their mothers than when they could see but not hear their mothers. The results demonstrated the suitability of global subjective ratings of affective state in studies of infant perception.Recent studies of early infant perception have focused on the suggestion (Bower, 1974;Gibson, 1969) that the sensory elements of the infant's perceptual world are already basically unified at birth: "Young babies do not appear to experience a world of unrelated visual and auditory sensations. They can perceive unitary auditory and visible events" (Spelke, 1979, pp. 635-636). Direct evidence for early intermodal coordination has been
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