title: Preverbal infants' sensitivity to synaesthetic cross-modality correspondences.
abstract: Stimulation of one sensory modality can induce perceptual experiences in another modality that reflect synaesthetic correspondences among different dimensions of sensory experience. In visual-hearing synaesthesia, for example, higher pitched sounds induce visual images that are brighter, smaller, higher in space, and sharper than those induced by lower pitched sounds. Claims that neonatal perception is synaesthetic imply that such correspondences are an unlearned aspect of perception. To date, the youngest children in whom such correspondences have been confirmed with any certainty were 2- to 3-year-olds. We examined preferential looking to assess 3- to 4-month-old preverbal infants' sensitivity to the correspondences linking auditory pitch to visuospatial height and visual sharpness. The infants looked longer at a changing visual display when this was accompanied by a sound whose changing pitch was congruent, rather than incongruent, with these correspondences. This is the strongest indication to date that synaesthetic cross-modality correspondences are an unlearned aspect of perception.
authors.affiliation: Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YF, United Kingdom. p.walker@lancaster.ac.uk
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Walker
authors.forename: J Gavin
authors.initials: JG
authors.lastname: Bremner
authors.forename: Uschi
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Mason
authors.forename: Jo
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Spring
authors.forename: Karen
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Mattock
authors.forename: Alan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Slater
authors.forename: Scott P
authors.initials: SP
authors.lastname: Johnson
mesh_terms: D001245:Association Learning; D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007804:Language Development; D008144:Loudness Perception; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010897:Pitch Discrimination; D002666:Psychology, Child; D011601:Psychophysics; D012858:Size Perception; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013067:Speech Perception