Intersensory Redundancy Guides the Development of Selective Attention, Perception, and Cognition in Infancy

Abstract

That the senses provide overlapping information for objects and events is no extravagance of nature. This overlap facilitates attention to critical aspects of sensory stimulation, those that are redundantly specified, and attenuates attention to nonredundantly specified stimulus properties. This selective attention is most pronounced in infancy and gives initial advantage to the perceptual processing of, learning of, and memory for stimulus properties that are redundant, or amodal (e.g., synchrony, rhythm, and intensity), at the expense of modality-specific properties (e.g., color, pitch, and timbre) that can be perceived through only one sense. We review evidence supporting this hypothesis and discuss its implications for theories of perceptual, cognitive, and social development.

Multisensory exploration and object individuation in infancy.

“…The results obtained by Bahrick and her colleagues (Bahrick & Lickliter, 2000, 2002Bahrick et al, 2004;Bahrick & Pickens, 1994;) make a straightforward prediction about how we might facilitate infants' use of color information as the basis for individuating objects. Recall that in the narrow-screen task, the objects are experienced only visually.…”

Behavioral and Neural Foundations of Multisensory Face-Voice Perception in Infancy

“…Gibson (1969) extended this work to perceptual development and described perceptual development as a process of increasing specificity where more global, invariant, and amodal properties like tempo, rhythm, and intensity, are typically perceived and learned prior to modality specific properties (Gibson, 1969;Gibson & Pick, 2000;Bahrick 2001). More recently, Bahrick and her colleagues proposed an Intersensory Redundancy Hypothesis (IRH) that builds from this ecological approach to perception as a framework for understanding how infants arrive at a veridical and unitary perception of our world, including infants' perception of faces and voices (Bahrick & Lickliter, 2000;Bahrick, Lickliter, & Flom, 2004). More specifically, the IRH provides an explanation for understanding what properties of an object or event (including faces and voices) infants will attend to, process, and remember based on the information available to the infant (Bahrick & Lickliter, 2000;.…”

“…More specifically, the IRH provides an explanation for understanding what properties of an object or event (including faces and voices) infants will attend to, process, and remember based on the information available to the infant (Bahrick & Lickliter, 2000;. One prediction of the IRH is that amodal properties such as tempo, rhythm, and intensity are more perceptually salient and will more Intersensory Perception 8 easily capture infants' attention when experienced in multimodal or multisensory contexts compared to a unimodal or unisensory contexts (see Bahrick, Lickliter, & Flom, 2004;Gibson, 1966, Gibson, 1969. Furthermore, the IRH predicts that infants will show an attenuated response to amodal properties when experienced in a unimodal context.…”

Color–function categories that prime infants to use color information in an object individuation task

“…Visual and tactile exploration provides infants with the opportunity to experience the same information in more than one modality, as well as to link information from one modality to another. There is evidence that multisensory experiences lead to the formation of multimodal object representations that are more rich and robust than unimodal representations (HerndanezReif & Bahrick, 2001;Bahrick & Lickliter, 2002;Bahrick, Flom, & Lickliter, 2004;Slater, Quinn, Brown, & Hayes, 1999).…”