Gottlieb promoted the value of a developmental psychobiological systems approach to the study of human development. This approach recognizes the importance of comparative, animal-based research to advancing our understanding of the complexities and dynamics of the process of development. The major contribution of animal developmental studies is…

Tested the ability of 3.5-month-old infants to detect audiovisual relations. Results demonstrated infants' visual recovery to changes in temporal synchrony of sight and sound and in composition of objects. Infants did not demonstrate visual recovery to changes in the relationship between pitch and color or shape. (BC)

Information presented concurrently and redundantly to 2 or more senses (intersensory redundancy) has been shown to recruit attention and promote perceptual learning of amodal stimulus properties in animal embryos and human infants. This study examined whether the facilitative effect of intersensory redundancy also extends to the domain of memory.…

Investigated the extent to which 3.5-month-old infants trained in amodal auditory-visual relations between falling objects and the sounds they made could generalize their intermodal knowledge to a new task and across events. Found that infants tested with familiar events and with events of a new color or shape showed learning and transfer…

Three experiments investigated discrimination and memory of 5.5-month-olds for videotapes of women performing different activities (blowing bubbles, brushing hair, brushing teeth) or static displays after a 1-minute and a 7-week delay. Findings demonstrate the attentional salience of actions over faces in dynamic events to 5.5-month-olds. Findings…

Assessed development of infants' sensitivity to two nested amodal temporal relations in audible and visible events. Found that sensitivity to synchrony was present by 4 weeks, remaining stable across age. Sensitivity to composition emerged by 7 weeks, increasing dramatically with age. Noted pattern of increasing specificity in perception…

Three experiments assessed the intersensory redundancy hypothesis in early infancy. Findings indicated that habituation to a bimodal rhythm resulted in discrimination of a novel rhythm, whereas habituation to the same rhythm presented unimodally resulted in no evidence of discrimination. Temporal synchrony between the bimodal auditory and visual…