Intermodal perception at birth: newborn infants' memory for arbitrary auditory–visual pairings

Most of the stimuli that we experience are intermodal in that they provide information to more than one sensory modality. Some of these intermodal relationships are amodal in that they provide equivalent information to the senses, while others are quite arbitrary. For instance, there is no information specifying that a particular voice has to be associated with a particular face, or that a particular animal makes a particular sound. The ability of newborn infants to learn arbitrary visual–auditory associations was investigated by familiarizing 2-day-old infants to two alternating visual stimuli (differing in colour and orientation), each accompanied by its ‘own’ sound. On post-familiarization test trials attention recovered to a novel visual–auditory combination. These findings are a clear demonstration that newborn infants can learn arbitrary visual–auditory associations, and they are discussed in terms of Bahrick's theory of early intermodal perception. ©1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.