An important aspect of the ability to perceive the visual environment as coherent and intelligible is a facility to integrate multiple sources of information within and across sensory modalities. Integration of this type is essential for pattern detection, and for the understanding of object relations, dynamic social relations, and action sequences. An inability to integrate multiple sources of information could be a vital aspect in disorders of cognitive development. There is a great deal of evidence suggesting that infants in the first year of life are adept at detecting statistical regularites in the perceptual environment (e.g., Fiser & Aslin, 2003; Kirkham, Slemmer, & Johnson, 2002; Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996). In addition, young infants are equally sensitive to correlations across modalities (e.g., Bahrick & Lickliter, 2000; Lewcowicz, 2000); indeed, they are capable of using this sensitivity to direct eye movements in anticipation of upcoming events (Richardson & Kirkham, 2004). Given the multimodal, dynamic nature of the natural environment, infants must be able to integrate the important correlations in order to establish coherent perceptual representations. Infants must be not only sensitive to these correlations, but also capable of learning from them. Using eye tracking technology and habituation procedures, I plan to investigate the importance and usefulness of multiple cue integration in statistical learning over the first year of life. How do multiple perceptual cues aid in pattern detection? What do infants do with their ability to detect these statistical relationships? Understanding the impact of multiple cue integration on infant learning in a probabilistic environment will help inform accounts of the relative role of learning and innate knowledge in development. Moreover, cognitive disorders, such as autism, may be related to problems with integrating different sources of information (Just, Cherkassy, Keller, & Minshew, 2004). Information about the parameters of multiple cue integration across the first year of life, therefore, might provide a valuable tool for clinical assessment.
| Kirkham, Natasha Z; Richardson, Daniel C; Wu, Rachel et al. (2012) The importance of ""what"": infants use featural information to index events. J Exp Child Psychol 113:430-9 |
| Kirkham, Natasha Z; Wagner, Jennifer B; Swan, Kristen A et al. (2012) Sound support: intermodal information facilitates infants' perception of an occluded trajectory. Infant Behav Dev 35:174-8 |
