Dr Andy Bremner, University of Birmingham

Rethinking multisensory development

Advances in the methods available for studying perceptual abilities in young infants over the last 40-50 years have revealed a degree of multisensory sophistication in the first months of life which threatens earlier notions of the newborn as naïve in that regard (e.g., notions from James and Piaget). Nonetheless, I will argue that current theoretical accounts of the developmental processes accounting for such early ability (e.g., Bahrick & Lickliter’s, 2000, 2014, intersensory redundancy hypothesis) are unsatisfactory in that they are not consistent with all of the relevant data and also do little to address how the senses come together in the human foetus and infant in a manner which is computationally and neurally plausible (i.e., they do not consider how the crossmodal binding problem is solved). I will illustrate the importance of these concerns with a range of studies of the development of multisensory processes in human infants, and argue that future accounts of multisensory development should consider: i) how spatiotemporally and semantically coherent crossmodal binding is learned through sensory experience, and ii) how the changing biological and sensorimotor constraints of the developing infant impinge on multisensory development.

Host: Jeanne Shinskey

Keywords: development; multisensory integration; crossmodal binding