Multisensory object perception in infancy: 4-month-olds perceive a mistuned harmonic as a separate auditory and visual object.

ABSTRACT: Infants learn to use auditory and visual information to organize the sensory world into identifiable objects with particular locations. Here we use a behavioural method to examine infants' use of harmonicity cues to auditory object perception in a multisensory context. Sounds emitted by different objects sum in the air and the auditory system must figure out which parts of the complex waveform belong to different sources (auditory objects). One important cue to this source separation is that complex tones with pitch typically contain a fundamental frequency and harmonics at integer multiples of the fundamental. Consequently, adults hear a mistuned harmonic in a complex sound as a distinct auditory object (Alain, Theunissen, Chevalier, Batty, & Taylor, 2003). Previous work by our group demo

SUBMITTER: Smith NA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5429982 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature