Lickliter Robert, Bahrick Lorraine E
Department of Psychology Florida International University.
Infancy. 2001 Oct;2(4):451-467. doi: 10.1207/S15327078IN0204_04. Epub 2001 Oct 1.
Studies of infant development concerned with the emergence of specific perceptual or cognitive abilities have typically focused on responsiveness in only one sensory modality. Research on infant perception, learning, and memory often attempts to reduce multimodal stimulation to "noise" and to control or omit stimulation from other sensory modalities in experimental designs. This type of unimodal research, although important, may not generalize well to the behavior of infants in the multimodal context of the everyday world. Research from animal and human development is reviewed that documents that significant differences in infants' perceptual skills and abilities can be observed under conditions of unimodal versus multimodal stimulation. These studies provide converging evidence for a functional distinction between unimodal and multimodal stimulation during early development and suggest that ecological validity can be enhanced when research findings are generalized appropriately to the natural environment and are not overgeneralized across stimulus properties, tasks, or contexts.
关注特定感知或认知能力出现的婴儿发育研究通常仅聚焦于单一感官模态下的反应。关于婴儿感知、学习和记忆的研究常常试图将多模态刺激简化为“噪声”，并在实验设计中控制或排除来自其他感官模态的刺激。这种单模态研究虽然重要，但可能无法很好地推广到婴儿在日常多模态环境中的行为。本文回顾了来自动物和人类发育的研究，这些研究表明，在单模态与多模态刺激条件下，可以观察到婴儿感知技能和能力的显著差异。这些研究为早期发育过程中单模态和多模态刺激之间的功能区别提供了相互印证的证据，并表明当研究结果适当地推广到自然环境中，且不过度推广到刺激属性、任务或情境时，生态效度可以得到提高。
