Human Infant's Perception of Non-human Communication Signals
Ross A. Flom,
Psychology
It is well established that human infants are able to detect a variety of auditory-visual relationships for properties such as human affect or emotion and can also detect the relationship between various lip movements and speech sounds. Moreover it has also been proposed that the ability to perceive a various auditory-visual relationships is initially, in development, quite “broad” and over time this ability “narrows” or becomes more specific based on the experiences of the organism. The purpose of the current experiment is to 1) examine whether this ability does begin as quite broad and, 2) over time narrows, according to one’s experiences. In addition the majority of research examining intermodal perception has used human infants where little to no data is available examining whether and how this ability may change across the life span. In this experiment we will assess whether human infants can match aggressive and non-aggressive canine vocalizations (i.e. barks) with the appropriate (i.e., aggressive non-aggressive) facial expression/postures.
