TEMPORAL CONTIGUITY IN PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT

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The objects and events that characterize the infant's perceptual array are usually represented by concurrent attributes in different sensory modalities. Frequently, these attributes correspond in terms of their temporal characteristics. For example, when an infant interacts with another person, that person's face and voice relay a great deal of concurrent and temporally related information. Thus, as the person speaks, the face and voice are synchronized over time, have equal durations, and can be characterized by the same overall rhythmic quality. Whether and how infants detect such intermodal relations has been the subject of many studies, among them the PI's. This work has led the PI to postulate a sequential, hierarchic model of the development of responsiveness to different types of intermodal temporal relations. One of the basic assumptions of the model is that intermodal temporal contiguity plays a fundamental role in the development of responsiveness to the higher-level temporal amodal invariants and in the development of intermodal integration in general. A second assumption of the model, which derives from general developmental principles, is that infants will selectively attend to intermodal temporal relations regardless of the complexity of information given in the perceptual array. To test these assumptions, we will investigate developmental differences in infants' response to the temporal relations between the audible and visible attributes of the human face and voice and relate the findings to previous findings from studies testing responsiveness to less complex information. We will use the habituation/test method in a series of 6 studies with infants ranging in age from 3 to 12 months of age. Infants will first be habituated to a face/voice stimulus producing a consonant/vowel syllable having certain temporal properties and then tested to determine if they can discriminate changes in those temporal properties. Perception of intermodal temporal contiguity will be studied in the first experiment followed by a series of experiments in which the contribution of temporal intermodal contiguity to the perception of intermodal duration and rhythm will be investigated. The proposed project will provide a test of the generalizability of the PI's model and will provide important new insights into the role of intermodal temporal contiguity in perceptual development and into some key principles of development.