When Vacuum Cleaners Bark and Dogs Buzz -: Infants' Integration of Sight and Sound on the Basis of Category Membership

The last 20 years have seen a logarithmic increase in infant developmental research. Infant categorization studies represent a key component of the overall modeling of infant conceptual development. Early categorization abilities are often explored in the visual modality. Because development occurs in a multimodal world, recent work in the area of intermodal perception tries to meet the demand of examining early modality integration. Studies document an early ability to establish intermodal relations and point to a close tie between intermodal perception and knowledge. This book gives an overview of the relevant literature and presents a study looking at infants' auditory-visual coordination. It investigates whether infants are able to connect visual and auditory information about animals and artifacts on the basis of previously acquired knowledge about these categories. This capability is tested in a crossmodal-matching task with pairwise picture presentation. 11-month-old infants demonstrate no matching effect of picture categories and corresponding sounds. However, results show a trend for sound to have an influence on visual preference. Possible reasons are discussed.