Crossmodal learning in newborn infants: Inferences about properties of auditory-visual events

The majority of research on infant crossmodal perception has addressed the question of whether infants 4 months and older demonstrate the ability. By contrast, the focus in the present study was on newborns and the primary go al was twofold: to determine if newborns can learn arbitrary sight-sound pa irings and to evaluate possible inferences that neonates make when repeated ly presented arbitrary sight-sound pairings. Alert neonates were Familiariz ed with toy-sound pairs using an infant-controlled habituation procedure. T hey were then given a violation-of-expectancy test to determine if they had learned these sight-sound pairings and drawn any inferences about certain properties of these bimodal events. Results supported the conclusion that i nfants just a few hours old can learn sight-sound pairings. Furthermore, th e findings suggested that newborns expected sight-sound pairs to remain col ocated even when they move to a new location, they recognized that the soun d was an attribute of a specific object, and they recognized that a specifi c spatial location was not an attribute of the sight-sound pair. Thus, infa nts made important and correct inferences based on limited experiences with specific auditory-visual events, and they did so just after birth. Implica tions of these findings for theories of crossmodal perceptual development a re discussed.