We know little about how infants locate voice and sound in a complex multi-modal space. Using a naturalistic laboratory experiment the present study tested 35 infants at 3 ages: 4 months (15 infants), 5 months (12 infants), and 7 months (8 infants). While they were engaged frontally with one experimenter, infants were presented with (a) a second experimenter's voice and (b) castanet sounds from three different locations (left, right, and behind). There were clear increases with age in the successful localization of sounds from all directions, and a decrease in the number of repetitions required for success. Nonetheless even at 4 months two-thirds of the infants attempted to search for the voice or sound. At all ages localizing sounds from behind was more difficult and was clearly present only at 7 months. Perseverative errors (looking at the last location) were present at all ages and appeared to be task specific (only present in the 7 month-olds for the behind location). Spontaneous attention shifts by the infants between the two experimenters, evident at 7 months, suggest early evidence for infant initiation of triadic attentional engagements. There was no advantage found for voice over castanet sounds in this study. Auditory localization is a complex and contextual process emerging gradually in the first half of the first year.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 6. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 03 September 2023.
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#6,861,012
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#9,802
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#95,263
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Outputs of similar age from Frontiers in Psychology
#241
of 588 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 26,561,175 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 74th percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 35,507 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 13.9. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 72% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 588 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 59% of its contemporaries.
