Preverbal Infants' Sensitivity to Synaesthetic Cross-Modality Correspondences

摘要

Stimulation of one sensory modality can induce perceptual experiences in another modality that reflect synaestheticcorrespondences among different dimensions of sensory experience. In visual-hearing synaesthesia, for example, higher pitchedsounds 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. Todate, 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 linkingauditory pitch to visuospatial height and visual sharpness. The infants looked longer at a changing visual display when this wasaccompanied by a sound whose changing pitch was congruent, rather than incongruent, with these correspondences. This isthe strongest indication to date that synaesthetic cross-modality correspondences are an unlearned aspect of perception.