Perception of moving, sounding objects by four-month-old infants.
Infants and adults were presented with two moving objects accompanied by a single percussive sound. In different experiments, the sound occurred when one object moved through a particular spatial position, when it abruptly changed its direction of movement, or when it made contact with a rigid surface. Infants responded to the sound-object relationship whenever the sound occurred as the object changed direction, irrespective of its impacts with the surface. Adults, in contrast, responded to the sound-object relationship most clearly when sounds were synchronized with impacts. In infancy, perception of auditory-visual relationships thus depends in part on detection of discontinuities in the movement of a visible object.
D001307:Auditory Perception; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005403:Fixation, Ocular; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D009039:Motion Perception; D002666:Psychology, Child