ABSTRACT
A dilemma with which infants must contend from birth is the organization of neural input arising simultaneously from different sensory routes. The prototypic instance is an object, just about any object. When dealing with its milk bottle, the human infant must accommodate differences in the neural activity arising from the bottle’s visual appearance, its smell, the tactile sensations associated with the nipple and the bottle itself that may occur simultaneously through the mouth and hands, how it tastes, and perhaps what it sounds like when manipulated. Despite all these potentially separate sensations and sites of neural activity, the infant’s task is to treat them as functionally equivalent in terms of a single object, the bottle. Research discussed in the present chapter is directed toward understanding age-related differences in learning about multiple sensory events that occur simultaneously; it is hoped that this might help us understand the processes through which infants learn about objects.
