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Intersensory Perception of Faces and Voices in Infants

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Abstract

This chapter describes and provides behavioral and neurophysiological evidence articulating how the intersensory redundancy hypothesis addresses the question of how infants integrate faces and voices in perceiving other people. Infants’ learning of the arbitrary relationship between faces and voices occurs in two tightly coupled steps. First, between 3 and 5 months of age infants attend to various amodal properties such as a common tempo, rhythm, and affective expressions that unite a particular face and voice. Second, around 6 months of age, when infants’ attention is more flexible and they perceive amodal and modality-specific properties, infants perceive and remember various arbitrary features (i.e., the sound of particular voice and the visual appearance of a particular face) associated with a particular face–voice pairing.

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To appear in P. Belin, S. Campanella, & T. Ethofer (Eds.) Integrating Face and Voice in Person Perception. Springer.

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Acknowledgments

Sir Isaac Newton is credited with the expression “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The research and thoughts contained within this chapter reflect a portion of the knowledge I acquired as a post-doc working and conversing with Lorraine Bahrick, her husband and colleague Robert Lickliter, and countless conversations with David Lewkowicz. In many respects each of these individuals could rightly claim authorship. Without their guidance and collaboration this chapter would not be possible and I am indebted to each. I am equally indebted to the students and the parents of the many infants who participated in experiments described herein.

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Correspondence to Ross Flom .

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Flom, R. (2013). Intersensory Perception of Faces and Voices in Infants. In: Belin, P., Campanella, S., Ethofer, T. (eds) Integrating Face and Voice in Person Perception. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3585-3_4

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