Intersensory Perceptual Narrowing in Human Infants

人类婴儿的感觉间知觉狭窄

• 批准号: 8898283
• 负责人: DAVID J LEWKOWICZ
• 金额: $ 31.64万
• 依托单位: NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2011-03-01 至 2017-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/8898283
• 关键词: Adult; Affect; Age; Age-Months; Animals; Auditory; Autistic Disorder; Behavioral; Birth; Child; Cognitive; Collection; Communication; Communication impairment; Conceptions; Cues; Detection; Development; Developmental Disabilities; Diagnostic; Discrimination; Discrimination Learning; Disease; Early Diagnosis; Employee Strikes; Etiology; Event; Exhibits; Face; Gender; Gestures; Health; Human; Infant; Intervention; Language; Learning; Learning Disorders; Life; Light; Literature; Measures; Mediating; Memory; Methods; Monkeys; Music; Nature; Pattern; Perception; Plastics; Play; Prevention; Primates; Process; Race; Research; Role; Sensory; Series; Source; Specific qualifier value; Speech; Speech Perception; Speech Sound; Stimulus; Stream; Tactile; Techniques; Testing; Thinking; Time; Visual; Visual attention; Voice; base; design; developmental disease; experience; improved; indexing; infancy; infant animal; insight; multisensory; novel; prevent; relating to nervous system; response; skills; social; social communication; sound; spatiotemporal; theories; tool; vocalization

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The two primary channels of communication in primate species are the face and the voice. Normally, facial gestures and accompanying vocalizations provide highly redundant information because they are always spatially co-located, temporally synchronous, and specified by overlapping patterns of dynamic audible and visible information. Adults profit from the multisensory redundancy that vocalizing faces offer because they use the redundancy to integrate the separate auditory and visual streams of information into coherent perceptual experiences and because the redundancy makes it easier to detect, learn, and remember vocalizing faces. Although extant evidence indicates that the ability to take advantage of multisensory redundancy emerges early in infancy, the processes underlying its emergence are still poorly understood. Consequently, the current project investigates the development of face-voice integration in human infants and explores the novel idea that perceptual narrowing plays a critical role in the development of intersensory integration. This novel idea is based on a recent discovery by the PI & his colleagues that younger infants can integrate a broader range of faces and voices than do older infants. We have found that young infants can integrate nonnative faces and vocalizations (either monkey faces and their vocalizations or foreign visible and audible speech sounds) but that older infants do not. Our findings are striking because they are counterintuitive and contrary to predictions arising from extant theories of intersensory development. They are, however, consistent with a growing literature on narrowing effects in the speech, face, and music processing domains and suggest that narrowing is a pan-sensory, domain-general process. Consequently, the current project will investigate intersensory perceptual narrowing (IPN). It will be guided by 5 specific aims whose purpose will be to shed light on: (1) the role of temporal intersensory synchrony, configural processing, gestural features, and language-general processes in IPN, (2) the general nature of IPN by testing for it across different types of integration tasks, (3) the role of experience in IPN, (4) the separate contribution of unisensory perceptual processes to IPN, and (5) whether the sensitive period for IPN is affected by multisensory redundancy. We will use the intersensory matching technique to examine face-voice integration, the habituation/test method to investigate learning and discrimination of faces and voices, and measure infant visual attention to index responsiveness. By shedding light on the perceptual and experience-dependent mechanisms that underlie the development of face-voice integration in infancy, this project will provide insights into the emergence of a critical communicative skill that is essential to adaptive functioning at the perceptual, cognitive, and social levels. This, in turn, will provide insights into the etiology of various developmental disorders (e.g., autism) and will facilitate the development of better diagnostic tools for such disorders and help develop better intervention methods to ameliorate these disorders.

描述（由申请人提供）：灵长类动物的两种主要交流渠道是面部和声音。通常情况下，面部手势和伴随的发声提供了高度冗余的信息，因为它们总是在空间上共存，在时间上同步，并且由动态听觉和视觉信息的重叠模式指定。成年人从发声面孔提供的多感官冗余中获益，因为他们使用冗余将分离的听觉和视觉信息流整合到连贯的感知体验中，因为冗余使检测、学习和记忆发声面孔变得更容易。尽管现有证据表明，利用多感官冗余的能力在婴儿期早期就出现了，但其产生的过程仍然知之甚少。因此，目前的项目调查了人类婴儿面孔-声音整合的发展，并探索了感知变窄在感觉间整合发展中起关键作用的新观点。这个新颖的想法是基于PI和他的同事最近的一项发现，即年幼的婴儿比大一点的婴儿能整合更广泛的面孔和声音。我们发现，年幼的婴儿可以整合非母语面孔和发声（无论是猴子面孔和它们的发声，还是外国的可见和可听的语音），但大一点的婴儿做不到这一点。我们的发现是惊人的，因为它们是反直觉的，与现有的感官间发展理论的预测相反。然而，他们与越来越多的关于语音、面部和音乐处理领域的缩窄效应的文献一致，并表明缩窄是一个泛感官的、领域一般的过程。因此，目前的项目将研究感觉间知觉狭窄（IPN）。它将以5个具体目标为指导，其目的是阐明：(1)时间间感觉同步、配置处理、手势特征和一般语言过程在IPN中的作用，(2)通过不同类型的整合任务测试IPN的一般性质，(3)经验在IPN中的作用，(4)无感觉知觉过程对IPN的单独贡献，以及(5)IPN的敏感期是否受到多感觉冗余的影响。我们将使用感觉间匹配技术来研究面孔和声音的整合，使用习惯化/测试方法来研究面孔和声音的学习和区分，并测量婴儿的视觉注意指数反应。通过揭示婴儿期脸-声音融合发展的知觉和经验依赖机制，该项目将为在知觉、认知和社会层面的适应功能中至关重要的关键沟通技能的出现提供见解。反过来，这将为各种发育障碍（如自闭症）的病因提供见解，并将促进开发更好的诊断工具，并帮助开发更好的干预方法来改善这些障碍。