CDC Seminar, Andrew Bremner (Goldsmiths, University of London) -- The multisensory milieu in early life: How infants and children construct multisensory representations of their bodies and the world

Our various sense organs develop according to widely varying timetables across pre- and post-natal life. Each sense organ provides information in largely different neural codes (vision codes space in retinotopic coordinates, touch in somatotopic coordinates and so on), and according to different schedules of environmental and sensory transduction. To further complicate matters, the spatial relationships between the senses vary substantially with movements of the body, like when the eyes move in their sockets or when the body changes shape as it grows during development. I will describe our current research which addresses how infants and children manage to combine these multiple signals into unified functional representations of the world and themselves, focussing especially on the development of an ability to appropriately combine visual, tactile, and proprioceptive cues to hand position. Whilst the current dominant theories concerning multisensory development agree that infants are able to encode “amodal” spatial aspects of the multisensory environment relatively independently of sensory experience, I will argue that the evidence in support of this view has important limitations, and that our abilities to perceive multisensory spatial and temporal aspects of one’s body and the world have extended developmental trajectories which depend on sensorimotor experience.