The primary goal of the proposed research is to further our understanding of the nature and basis of the development of intermodal perception of audible and visible events in infancy. Prior research has primarily focused on identifying the nature of cross-modal invariant relations detected by infants. Their findings have been consistent with Gibson's invariant-detection view of perceptual development, but they have left many important questions regarding the nature and basis of intermodal learning and development unanswered. The proposed research will fill this gap by examining the process of intermodal learning directly in a new intermodal training and transfer method. Infants of 2-6 months will receive training with natural, audible and visible events and then the audio-visual relations detected through training will be assessed under a variety of conditions. Three levels of nested audio-visual relations that characterize the stimulation from single events have been delineated: temporal synchrony uniting the sights and sounds of an object's impact, temporal microstructure specifying the composition of an object, and modality-specific relations between the pitch of a sound and the color and shape of an object. This research will identify the developmental progression of infants' detection of these nested relations, providing the first test of whether intermodal learning of nested audio-visual relations proceeds in order of increasing specificity, or in some other developmental sequence. Further, through a series of transfer of training studies, this research will provide the first assessment of how and under what conditions intermodal knowledge acquired in one stimulus context becomes flexibly extended to new event contexts. The attainment of this sort of flexible rule-based knowledge is the essence of intelligent functioning. An understanding of this process will promote the development of norms for intermodal functioning and transfer of training at various ages in infancy. Consequently, one can eventually diagnose abnormal patterns of development.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01HD025669-02
Application #
3326863
Study Section
Human Development and Aging Subcommittee 3 (HUD)
Project Start
1990-09-01
Project End
1994-04-30
Budget Start
1991-05-01
Budget End
1992-04-30
Support Year
2
Fiscal Year
1991
Total Cost
Indirect Cost
Name
Florida International University
Department
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
071298814
City
Miami
State
FL
Country
United States
Zip Code
33199
Gogate, Lakshmi; Maganti, Madhavilatha; Bahrick, Lorraine E (2015) Cross-cultural evidence for multimodal motherese: Asian Indian mothers' adaptive use of synchronous words and gestures. J Exp Child Psychol 129:110-26
Flom, Ross; Bahrick, Lorraine E (2007) The development of infant discrimination of affect in multimodal and unimodal stimulation: The role of intersensory redundancy. Dev Psychol 43:238-52
Bahrick, Lorraine E; Hernandez-Reif, Maria; Flom, Ross (2005) The development of infant learning about specific face-voice relations. Dev Psychol 41:541-52
Bahrick, Lorraine E (2002) Generalization of learning in three-and-a-half-month-old infants on the basis of amodal relations. Child Dev 73:667-81
Bahrick, Lorraine E; Flom, Ross; Lickliter, Robert (2002) Intersensory redundancy facilitates discrimination of tempo in 3-month-old infants. Dev Psychobiol 41:352-63
Bahrick, Lorraine E; Gogate, Lakshmi J; Ruiz, Ivonne (2002) Attention and memory for faces and actions in infancy: the salience of actions over faces in dynamic events. Child Dev 73:1629-43
Bahrick, L E (2001) Increasing specificity in perceptual development: infants' detection of nested levels of multimodal stimulation. J Exp Child Psychol 79:253-70
Lickliter, R; Bahrick, L E (2000) The development of infant intersensory perception: advantages of a comparative convergent-operations approach. Psychol Bull 126:260-80
Gogate, L J; Bahrick, L E; Watson, J D (2000) A study of multimodal motherese: the role of temporal synchrony between verbal labels and gestures. Child Dev 71:878-94
Bahrick, L E; Lickliter, R (2000) Intersensory redundancy guides attentional selectivity and perceptual learning in infancy. Dev Psychol 36:190-201

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