RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Infants are superior in implicit crossmodal learning and use other learning mechanisms than adults
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 139535
DO 10.1101/139535
A1 Sophie Rohlf
A1 Boukje Habets
A1 Marco von Frieling
A1 Brigitte Röder
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/18/139535.abstract
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.