Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, Box 1225, 751 42 Uppsala, Sweden.
Neuropsychologia. 2011 Jun;49(7):2131-5. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.03.040. Epub 2011 Apr 6.
Both orienting to audiovisual synchrony and to biological motion are adaptive responses. The ability to integrate correlated information from multiple senses reduces processing load and underlies the perception of a multimodal and unified world. Perceiving biological motion facilitates filial attachment and detection of predators/prey. In the literature, these mechanisms are discussed in isolation. In this eye-tracking study, we tested their relative strengths in young human infants. We showed five-month-old infants point-light animation pairs of human motion, accompanied by a soundtrack. We found that audiovisual synchrony was a strong determinant of attention when it was embedded in biological motion (two upright animations). However, when biological motion was shown together with distorted biological motion (upright animation and inverted animation, respectively), infants looked at the upright animation and disregarded audiovisual synchrony. Thus, infants oriented to biological motion rather than multimodally unified physical events. These findings have important implications for understanding the developmental trajectory of brain specialization in early human infancy.
对视听同步和生物运动的定向都是适应性反应。整合来自多个感觉的相关信息的能力可以减少处理负荷，并且是感知多模态和统一世界的基础。感知生物运动有助于依恋子女和察觉捕食者/猎物。在文献中，这些机制是分开讨论的。在这项眼动研究中，我们测试了它们在年幼的人类婴儿中的相对强度。我们向五个月大的婴儿展示了点光源动画的人类运动对，伴随着背景音乐。我们发现，当视听同步嵌入生物运动（两个直立动画）中时，它是注意力的一个强有力的决定因素。然而，当生物运动与扭曲的生物运动（分别为直立动画和倒立动画）一起展示时，婴儿会看着直立动画而忽略视听同步。因此，婴儿会定向于生物运动，而不是多模态统一的物理事件。这些发现对理解人类婴儿早期大脑专门化的发展轨迹具有重要意义。
