Three-month-old infants learn arbitrary auditory–visual pairings between voices and faces

✍ Scribed by Helen Brookes; Alan Slater; Paul C. Quinn; David J. Lewkowicz; Rachel Hayes; Elizabeth Brown

• Book ID: 102269602
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2001
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 113 KB
• Volume: 10
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1522-7227
• DOI: 10.1002/icd.249

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

The ability of 3‐month‐old infants to learn arbitrary auditory–visual associations between voices and faces was investigated by familiarizing each infant to two alternating stimuli presented on a VCR monitor. Each stimulus was a voice–face combination, where the voices and faces were male and/or female. On the post‐familiarization test trials each infant was presented alternately with a familiar and a novel voice–face combination, where the novel combination consisted of a voice and a face they had heard and seen previously (but not together), and on these test trials attention was significantly higher to the novel combination. These findings are a clear demonstration that 3‐month‐olds can learn arbitrary voice–face associations, and they are discussed in terms of early intermodal perception and face perception. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.