Development of Multisensory Function in Human Infants

The talk will focus on two aspects of the developmental emergence of multisensory perceptual skills in human infants. First, the talk will focus on findings indicating that sensitivity at birth to basic intersensory relations (e.g., intensity, synchrony) bootstraps the subsequent emergence of skills that enable infants to start detecting the multisensory coherence of communicative and social signals. Then, the talk will shift to a consideration of the mechanisms underlying the gradual emergence of multisensory skills by discussing the critical and sometimes paradoxical role that early perceptual experience plays in this process.