Infants' discrimination of vocal expressions: Contributions of auditory and visual information

Walker-Andrews, Arlene S.; Lennon, Elizabeth M.

doi:10.1016/0163-6383(91)90001-9

Cited by 104 publications

(71 citation statements)

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“…Later, by 5 months, differentiation of affect in voices emerges (A. J. Caron et al, 1988;Walker-Andrews & Lennon, 1991). By approximately 7 months of age, infants can perceive affect in faces and can successfully match faces and voices on the basis of affect (Soken & Pick, 1992;Walker, 1982;Walker-Andrews, 1986), suggesting recognition of affect rather than discrimination based solely on featural differences.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Caron, Caron, & MacLean, 1988;Walker-Andrews & Lennon, 1985). Research also has demonstrated that by 5 months of age infants are able to discriminate changes in affect on the basis of vocal expressions alone (Walker-Andrews & Grolnick, 1983;Walker-Andrews & Lennon, 1991), and by 7 months of age infants are able to discriminate static facial expressions on the basis of affect (R. F. Caron, Caron, & Myers, 1985;Kestenbaum & Nelson, 1990;Ludemann & Nelson, 1988; see Walker-Andrews, 1997, for a review). However, virtually no research has examined infants' sensitivity to affect in both bimodal and unimodal contexts, nor has any tested predictions regarding the developmental progression of infants' discrimination of affect.…”

Section: Nih-pa Author Manuscriptmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Presentation of the soundtrack was contingent on infants' fixation to the static face and, thus, allowed us to assess attention to the acoustic information. The pairing of an auditory stimulus with a static, nonchanging visual display has been used previously in our own research, as well as the research of others, in assessing infants' discrimination of auditory stimuli (see Bahrick, Flom, & Lickliter, 2002;Horowitz, 1974;Walker-Andrews & Grolnick, 1983;Walker-Andrews & Lennon, 1991). From habituation to test trials, we changed only the acoustic information for affect while the static face remained constant.…”

Section: Experiments 2: the Development Of Sensitivity To Affect In Unmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Flom

Bahrick

2007

Developmental Psychology

298

249

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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...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Nih-pa Author Manuscriptmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Experiments 2: the Development Of Sensitivity To Affect In Unmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Flom

Bahrick

2007

Developmental Psychology

298

249

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“…On the other hand, in unimodal emotion conditions, we presented an emotional signal of the target modality with neutral cues of the other modality. Although many studies testing infants' sensitivity to auditory emotions present auditory stimulus paired with neutral facial expressions [29,56,57], there still remains the possibility that these unnatural stimuli prevent infants from emitting natural responses. In addition, this manipulation made it difficult to compare the results fairly with previous findings of the mimicry for unimodal stimuli, which have mostly been focused on adults, as those studies usually do not present neutral signals of untargeted modality.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Isomura

Nakano

2016

Proc. R. Soc. B.

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Human adults automatically mimic others' emotional expressions, which is believed to contribute to sharing emotions with others. Although this behaviour appears fundamental to social reciprocity, little is known about its developmental process. Therefore, we examined whether infants show automatic facial mimicry in response to others' emotional expressions. Facial electromyographic activity over the corrugator supercilii (brow) and zygomaticus major (cheek) of four-to five-month-old infants was measured while they viewed dynamic clips presenting audiovisual, visual and auditory emotions. The audiovisual bimodal emotion stimuli were a display of a laughing/crying facial expression with an emotionally congruent vocalization, whereas the visual/auditory unimodal emotion stimuli displayed those emotional faces/vocalizations paired with a neutral vocalization/face, respectively. Increased activation of the corrugator supercilii muscle in response to audiovisual cries and the zygomaticus major in response to audiovisual laughter were observed between 500 and 1000 ms after stimulus onset, which clearly suggests rapid facial mimicry. By contrast, both visual and auditory unimodal emotion stimuli did not activate the infants' corresponding muscles. These results revealed that automatic facial mimicry is present as early as five months of age, when multimodal emotional information is present.

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“…However, three-month-old infants discriminated the expression of sadness from happiness when habituated to a sad vocal expression, but showed no evidence of discrimination if habituated to the expression of happiness and tested with sad vocal expressions. Similarly, Walker-Andrews & Lennon, 1991 found that by five months of age infants discriminated between angry, happy, and sad vocal expressions when presented with a static facial expression but showed no evidence of discrimination when the vocal expressions were presented with a checkerboard. Thus, these infants required the context of a face to discriminate vocal emotional expressions.…”

Section: Infant-controlled Habituationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Contingency and Gaze Direction in the Emergence of Social Referencing

Molina¹

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Infants' discrimination of vocal expressions: Contributions of auditory and visual information

Cited by 104 publications

References 10 publications

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

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

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

The Role of Contingency and Gaze Direction in the Emergence of Social Referencing

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