Infants' perception of synthetic-like multisensory relations

Studies have shown that human infants can integrate the multisensory attributes of their world and, thus, have coherent perceptual experiences. Multisensory attributes can either specify non-arbitrary (e.g., amodal stimulus/event properties and typical relations) or arbitrary properties (e.g., visuospatial height and pitch). The goal of the current study was to expand on Walker et al.'s (2010) finding that 4-month-old infants looked longer at rising/falling objects when accompanied by rising/falling pitch than when accompanied by falling/rising pitch. We did so by conducting two experiments. In Experiment 1, our procedure matched Walker et al.'s (2010) single screen presentation while in Experiment 2 we used a multisensory paired-preference procedure. Additionally, we examined infants' responsiveness to these synesthetic-like events at multiple ages throughout development (four, six, and 12 months of age). ... In sum, our findings indicate that the ability to match changing visuospatial height with rising/falling pitch does not emerge until the end of the first year of life and throw into doubt Walker et al.'s (2010) claim that 4-month-old infants perceive audiovisual synesthetic relations in a manner similar to adults.