ABSTRACT

Put yourself in the place of an infant attempting to make sense of the world. Objects and events come and go within your perceptual field. Most are multimodal and evoke a diversity of sights, sounds, and tactile and olfactory impressions simultaneously. The sound of your mother’s voice and the sight of her changing face; the feel of being picked up and of movement through space and the experience of a rapidly shifting visual field; the sounds of the radio and the smells of toast and coffee may all co-occur. Plow does the infant, like the adult, come to perceive a stable world of unitary objects and events from this continuously changing flux of stimulation? Plow does the infant determine which patterns of stimulation belong together and originate from a single event, and which are unrelated? How does she select stimulation that is relevant to her needs and actions?