PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Sophie Rohlf
AU  - Boukje Habets
AU  - Marco von Frieling
AU  - Brigitte Röder
TI  - Infants are superior in implicit crossmodal learning and use other learning mechanisms than adults
AID  - 10.1101/139535
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 139535
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/18/139535.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/18/139535.full
AB  - While adults have to continuously adapt their internal representations of the sensory world, infants need to first acquire these models. We used event-related potentials to test the hypothesis that infants extract crossmodal statistics implicitly while adults learn them when task relevant. Six-month-old infants and adults were passively exposed to frequent standard audio-visual combinations (A1V1, A2V2, p=0.35 each), rare recombinations of the standard stimuli (A1V2, A2V1, p=0.10 each), and a rare deviant audio-visual combination with an infrequent auditory and visual element (A3V3, p=0.10). While both infants and adults differentiated between rare deviants and standards at early processing stages, only infants discriminated standards from recombined stimuli at a later processing stage. A second experiment revealed that adults discriminated recombined from standard combinations only when crossmodal combinations were task relevant. These results demonstrate a heightened sensitivity for crossmodal statistics in infants and a change in learning mode from infancy to adulthood.