David J. Lewkowicz - Böcker

We perceive and understand our environment using many sensory systems-vision, touch, hearing, taste, smell, and proprioception. These multiple sensory modalities not only give us complementary sources of information about the environment but also an understanding that is richer and more complex than one modality alone could achieve. As adults, we integrate the multiple signals from these sense organs into unified functional representations. However, the ease with which we accomplish this feat belies its computational complexity. Not only do the senses convey information about the environment in different neural codes, but the relationship between the senses frequently changes when, for example, the body changes posture (e.g. when the eyes move in their sockets), or indeed shape, when the body grows across development. These computational problems prompt an important question which represents the key focus of this book: How do we develop the ability to integrate the senses? While there is a considerable literature on the development of single senses, such as vision or hearing, few books have considered the development of all our senses, and more importantly, how they develop the ability to work with each other.This book is unique in exploring this extraordinary feat of human nature - how we develop the ability to integrate our senses. It will be an important book for all those in the fields of cognitive and developmental neuroscience.

This book provides the latest information about the development of intersensory perception -- a topic which has recently begun to receive a great deal of attention from researchers studying the general problem of perceptual development. This interest was inspired after the realization that unimodal perception of sensory information is only the first stage of perceptual processing. Under normal conditions, an organism is faced with multiple, multisensory sources of information and its task is to either select a single relevant source of information or select several sources of information and integrate them. In general, perception and action on the basis of multiple sources of information is more efficient and effective. Before greater efficiency and effectiveness can be achieved, however, the organism must be able to integrate the multiple sources of information. By doing so, the organism can then achieve a coherent and unified percept of the world. The various chapters in this book examine the developmental origins of intersensory perceptual capacities by presenting the latest research on the development of intersensory perceptual skills in a variety of different species. By adopting a comparative approach to this problem, this volume as a whole helps uncover similarities as well as differences in the mechanisms underlying the development of intersensory integration. In addition, it shows that there is no longer any doubt that intersensory interactions occur right from the beginning of the developmental process, that the nature of these intersensory interactions changes as development progresses, and that early experience contributes in important ways to these changes.