PLoS ONE (Jan 2013)

Neural responses to multimodal ostensive signals in 5-month-old infants.

  • Eugenio Parise,
  • Gergely Csibra

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0072360
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 8, no. 8
p. e72360

Abstract

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Infants' sensitivity to ostensive signals, such as direct eye contact and infant-directed speech, is well documented in the literature. We investigated how infants interpret such signals by assessing common processing mechanisms devoted to them and by measuring neural responses to their compounds. In Experiment 1, we found that ostensive signals from different modalities display overlapping electrophysiological activity in 5-month-old infants, suggesting that these signals share neural processing mechanisms independently of their modality. In Experiment 2, we found that the activation to ostensive signals from different modalities is not additive to each other, but rather reflects the presence of ostension in either stimulus stream. These data support the thesis that ostensive signals obligatorily indicate to young infants that communication is directed to them.