Early Experience & Multisensory Perceptual Narrowing

By David J. Lewkowicz. 2014

133 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Perceptual narrowing is a reflection of early experience and contributes in key ways to perceptual and cognitive development. In general, findings have shown that unisensory perceptual sensitivity in early infancy is broadly tuned such that young infants respond to, and discriminate, native as well as non-native sensory inputs, whereas older infants only respond to native inputs. Recently, my colleagues and I discovered that perceptual narrowing occurs at the multisensory processing level as well. The present article reviews this new evidence and puts it in the larger context of multisensory perceptual development and the role that perceptual experience plays in it. Together, the evidence on unisensory and multisensory narrowing shows that early experience shapes the emergence of perceptual specialization and expertise.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Sensory Systems, Cognitive Science & Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Continual Lifelong Learning with Neural Networks: A Review (2018, background): “Lewkowicz, D. J. (2014). Early experience & multisensory perceptual narrowing.”
Lifelong Learning of Spatiotemporal Representations With Dual-Memory Recurrent Self-Organization (2018, background): “brain areas (Power and Schlaggar, 2016; Zenke et al., 2017a). Such mechanisms support the development of the human cognitive system on the basis of sensorimotor experiences over sustained time spans (Lewkowicz, 2014). Crucially, the brain must constantly perform two complementary tasks: (i) recollec”
Multisensory Processes: A Balancing Act across the Lifespan (2016, background): “This process is known as multisensory perceptual narrowing [20,22] and reflects the cumulative effects of early and selective experience.”
Functional connectivity of visual cortex in the blind follows retinotopic organization principles (2015, methodology): “…other sensory modalities and domains, including hearing and language capabilities, as well as multisensory processes, which also represent a balance between experience-dependent and independent developmental processes (Moore and Shannon, 2009; Butler and Lomber, 2013; Kral, 2013; Lewkowicz, 2014).”
The COGs (context, object, and goals) in multisensory processing (2016, background): “…Matusz et al. 2015b; ten Oever et al. 2013) are vital to the presence and the effects of many multisensory processes that are dependent on object matching, sensitivity to both multisensory simultaneity and speech congruency seems to develop early in life (Soto-Faraco et al. 2012; Lewkowicz 2014).”
Bilingualism Modulates Infants' Selective Attention to the Mouth of a Talking Face (2015, methodology): “For this comparison, we examined responsiveness to each test language separately, because responsiveness to native versus nonnative languages begins to differ early in infancy (Lewkowicz, 2014; Lewkowicz & Hansen-Tift, 2012; Pons et al., 2009; Werker & Tees, 2005).”
The Construct of the Multisensory Temporal Binding Window and its Dysregulation in Developmental Disabilities (2014, background): “, rhythm) (Lewkowicz & Lickliter, 1994; Lewkowicz & Ghazanfar, 2009; Lewkowicz, 2014).”