Most perceptual, cognitive, affective, and linguistic events are specified concurrently in different sensory modalities and are distributed across time. Time and its various temporal attributes such as contiguity, duration, rate, and rhythmic structure can be represented equally well across modalities and thus provide a major basis for the integration of the heteromodal attributes of multimodally represented events and objects. Empirical evidence indicates that human infants can perceive some of these intermodal temporal attributes and can use them to integrate heteromodal inputs. Indeed, it seems that this ability is part of a generalized perceptual mechanism that constrains perception by focusing the infant's attention on intermodally temporally integrated events. Given that intermodally integrated events are a fundamental part of the infant's everyday experience, understanding the processes underlying the development of such abilities is critical. Recently the PI put forth a sequential, hierarchic model that provides a theoretical framework for the study of the development of responsiveness to intermodal temporal relations. The model proposes that due to the differential informational complexity of the four different temporal intermodal relations, responsiveness to intermodal temporal contiguity, duration, rate, and rhythm emerges sequentially in that order. Furthermore, the differentiation and emergence of responsiveness to the more complex intermodal temporal relations is dependent on the prior emergence of responsiveness to the simpler relations. The purpose of the current project is to carry out a systematic investigation of the development of infants' responsiveness to intermodal temporal relations by studying responsiveness to intermodal temporal contiguity, duration, rate, and rhythm in infants between 1 and 12 months of age. The habituation/test technique, together with measures of attention, will be used to investigate developmental differences in infants' responsiveness to each of the four types of intermodal temporal relations. Based on the PI's model and its extensions, a series of 18 experiments is proposed to test various predictions arising from the model and its extensions. The results will: (a) explicate mechanisms underlying the anticipated developmental changes in responsiveness to intermodal temporal relations, (b) add to our understanding of the development of a process that enables infants to learn about the psychological unity of their experience, and (c) help further develop and refine measures of perceptual functioning that already have proved to have diagnostic utility in detecting aberrant developmental outcomes.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01HD035849-02
Application #
6182658
Study Section
Human Development and Aging Subcommittee 3 (HUD)
Program Officer
Feerick, Margaret M
Project Start
1999-05-01
Project End
2004-04-30
Budget Start
2000-05-01
Budget End
2001-04-30
Support Year
2
Fiscal Year
2000
Total Cost
$185,176
Indirect Cost
Name
Institute for Basic Research in Dev Disabil
Department
Type
DUNS #
167205090
City
Staten Island
State
NY
Country
United States
Zip Code
10314
Lewkowicz, David J (2010) Infant perception of audio-visual speech synchrony. Dev Psychol 46:66-77
Stein, Barry E; Burr, David; Constantinidis, Christos et al. (2010) Semantic confusion regarding the development of multisensory integration: a practical solution. Eur J Neurosci 31:1713-20
Zangenehpour, Shahin; Ghazanfar, Asif A; Lewkowicz, David J et al. (2009) Heterochrony and cross-species intersensory matching by infant vervet monkeys. PLoS One 4:e4302
Marcovitch, Stuart; Lewkowicz, David J (2009) Sequence learning in infancy: the independent contributions of conditional probability and pair frequency information. Dev Sci 12:1020-5
Lewkowicz, David J; Berent, Iris (2009) Sequence learning in 4-month-old infants: do infants represent ordinal information? Child Dev 80:1811-23
Lewkowicz, David J; Sowinski, Ryan; Place, Silvia (2008) The decline of cross-species intersensory perception in human infants: underlying mechanisms and its developmental persistence. Brain Res 1242:291-302
Lewkowicz, David J (2008) Perception of dynamic and static audiovisual sequences in 3- and 4-month-old infants. Child Dev 79:1538-54
Lewkowicz, David J; Ghazanfar, Asif A (2006) The decline of cross-species intersensory perception in human infants. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 103:6771-4
Lewkowicz, David J; Marcovitch, Stuart (2006) Perception of audiovisual rhythm and its invariance in 4- to 10-month-old infants. Dev Psychobiol 48:288-300
Lewkowicz, David J (2004) Perception of serial order in infants. Dev Sci 7:175-84

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