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Newly published research shows that younger infants can perceive the link between the faces and voices of another species, but older infants lose this ability. This perceptual narrowing may thus be an integral part of human development.
David Lewkowicz, PhD, of the department of psychology at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton and Asif Ghazanfar, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at Princeton University, devised a sensory matching task, allowing infants to choose between one of two vocalizing monkey faces while listening to a vocalization (coo or grunt sound) that corresponded to one of the two faces.
The researchers tested groups of 4-, 6-, 8-, and 10-month-old infants and measured the time that they looked at each of two side-by-side faces, first in silence and then while listening to a sound that corresponded to one of the monkey's facial expressions.
The 4- and 6-month-old infants looked longer at the matching face in the in-sound condition than in the silent condition, while the 8- and 10-month-old infants did not.
These findings support the idea that similar perceptual narrowing processes operate across the different senses and that these processes reflect the effects of early developmental experience.
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