Infants' intermodal perception of events

Four-month-old infants viewed two sound motion picture films of simple, natural events. The films were projected side by side, as one of the two sound tracks was played through a centrally placed speaker. Infants' visual attention to the films was consistently influenced by what they heard: They looked primarily at the event specified by the sound track. The experiment demonstrates that infants are able to perceive relations between sights and sounds in the absence of spatial cues. They respond to a perceived intermodal invariance with increased attention to the event reaching them over two modalities.