Development of cross-modal processing.
The ability to process and integrate cross-modal input is important for many everyday tasks. The current paper reviews theoretical and empirical work examining cross-modal processing with a focus on recent findings examining infants' and children's processing of arbitrary auditory-visual pairings. The current paper puts forward a potential mechanism that may account for modality dominance effects found in a variety of cognitive tasks. The mechanism assumes that although early processing of auditory and visual input is parallel, attention is allocated in a serial manner with the modality that is faster to engage attention dominating later processing. Details of the mechanism, factors influencing processing of arbitrary auditory-visual pairings, and implications for higher-order tasks are discussed. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.
Cognitive Development Lab, Center for Cognitive Science, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
Christopher W
CW
Robinson
Cognitive Development Lab, Center for Cognitive Science, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
Vladimir M
VM
Sloutsky