A number of studies are proposed for investigating how visual and tactual exploration interact with one another and with particular object properties during infancy. Interactions among these factors are considered to be determinants of infants' behavior on cross-modal tasks; furthermore, they delimit what infants can learn from inspecting objects biomodally. In two studies, whether infants direct their tactual explorations of objects according to the information available visually will be investigated. The manual behavior of 6- to 11-month-olds when certain tangible features can be seen will be compared to their behavior when the features cannot be seen. In a third study, the converse notion that infants may direct their visual explorations according to what they perceive by touch will be examined. Whether 9- and 12-month-olds adjust their posture in order to see an object feature that they can initially only feel will be observed. In another study, the hypothesis to be tested is that young infants may become so engrossed with the tactual exploration of objects that their sensitivity to visual properties of the objects is diminished. Six-month-olds' visual recognition memory for an object following bimodal familiarization will be compared to their tactual recognition memory for it, and to their visual recognition memory following only visual familiarization. In another study, it is hypothesized that infants' manual exploration may be elicited by visual information, but that once initiated, it is affected only by tactual information. Six-month-olds will be offered a familiar and a novel object, and their initial choice of which to touch as well as the extent of the consequent manual exploration will be noted. These variables will be compared across conditions in which novelty is specified only visually, only tactually, or in both modalities. In the final study, what sort of prior explorations may facilitate infants' recognition of objects across vision and touch will be investigated. The cross-modal matching performances of 6-month-olds who have seen the involved objects before, touched them before, or both will be compared to one another, and to the performance of infants for whom the objects are unfamiliar. The results of these studies will contribute to our understanding of the development of important relations between vision and touch and will advance our knowledge of how infants explore and ultimately come to understand the objects and events in their environment.
| Bushnell, E W; Weinberger, N (1987) Infants' detection of visual-tactual discrepancies: asymmetries that indicate a directive role of visual information. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 13:601-8 |
