Infants' visual‐proprioceptive intermodal perception with imperfect contingency information

Abstract

Two experiments explored 5-month-old infants' recognition of selfmovement in the context of imperfect contingencies between felt and seen movement. Previous work has shown that infants can discriminate a display of another child's movements from an on-line video display of their own movements, even when featural information is removed. These earlier findings were extended by demonstrating self versus other discrimination when the visual information for movement was an unrelated object (a fluorescent mobile) directly attached to the child's leg, thus producing imperfect spatial and temporal contingency information. In contrast, intermodal recognition failed when the mobile was indirectly attached to infants' legs, thus eliminating spatial contingencies altogether and further weakening temporal contingencies. Together, these studies reveal that even imperfect contingency information can drive intermodal perception, given appropriate levels of spatial and temporal contingency information. ß 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 49: 387-398, 2007.

Stimulus contingency and the malleability of species‐typical auditory preferences in Northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus) hatchlings

“…Watson (1972, 2001) and others have argued that degree of stimulus contingency can be seen as providing an invariant ground for the early discrimination both of “self” from “other” (e.g., Bahrick & Watson, 1985; Miyazaki & Hiraki, 2006; Rochat & Morgan, 1995; Schmuckler & Jewell, 2007) and of social from nonsocial stimulation in general (e.g., Gergely & Watson, 1999; Watson, 1972). In this view, a high degree of contingency (or “perfect contingency”) invariantly stems from self-initiated action, particularly from the manipulation of one’s own body and nonsocial objects.…”

Development of Normal Fetal Movements

“…The ability to produce motor patterns that are expressed at only one developmental stage is not lost as the animal matures, but can be re-induced by applying the proper sensory input at more mature stages [28]. Research in vertebrates indicates that new rhythmic motor displays arise by changes in the central pattern generators that produce earlier motions.…”

“…Apnoea is an almost universal phenomenon in mammals, before birth and with dying, just as gasping is nearly universal at the beginning and the end of life [28]. In the adult, gasping is a particular form of emergency respiration noted especially during choking, hypoglycaemia, neuromuscular failure and cardiac arrest.…”

“…The contraction of the respiratory muscles causes an alteration of the shape of the thorax and lungs and is stopped by section of the phrenic nerve [28]. The diaphragm is innervated principally by the phrenic nerve, arising in the mid-cervical spinal cord.…”

The effects of exposure to dynamic expressions of affect on 5-month-olds’ memory

“…An overall ANOVA using affect of familiarization as the between subjects factor and PTLT as the dependent variable failed to reach significance F (2, 57) = .76, p > .1. The fact that the overall ANOVA failed to reach significance is not uncommon in experiments using infants' PTLT as the dependent variable because the range of proportions of looking times is typically quite small, e.g., .40-.60 (see Schmuckler, 1996;Schmuckler & Fairhall, 2001 for a similar pattern of results).…”