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Serial order processing in human infants and the role of multisensory redundancy

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Abstract

Perception, production, and understanding of sequences is fundamental to human behavior and depends, in large part, on the ability to detect serial order. Despite the importance of this issue across many domains of human functioning, the development of serial order skills has been neglected in developmental studies. The current article reviews evidence that the basic temporal and spatiotemporal skills that are necessary for the development of serial order skills emerge early in human development. The article then presents recent evidence from the author’s laboratory showing that serial order perceptual skills emerge at the same time and improve rapidly. Consistent with a multisensory redundancy view of perception, when serial order perceptual abilities first emerge in infancy, they depend critically on the redundant specification of sequences in both the auditory and visual modalities. The findings suggest that infants’ ability to perceive the surface serial order characteristics of sequentially organized events provides the necessary antecedents to the development of more complex serial order skills that ultimately enable us to extract meanings from sequentially organized events and perform complex sequential actions.

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Acknowledgements

I express my deep gratitude to Marcia Dabbene for her assistance with the empirical work reviewed here. The research presented here was supported in part by the New York State Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities and by NICHD grant R01 HD35849.

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  1. Department of Psychology, Florida Atlantic University, 2912 College Avenue, Davie, FL 33314, USA

    David J. Lewkowicz

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  1. David J. Lewkowicz
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Correspondence to David J. Lewkowicz.

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Edited by: Marie-Hélène Giard and Mark Wallace

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Lewkowicz, D.J. Serial order processing in human infants and the role of multisensory redundancy. Cogn Process 5, 113–122 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-004-0015-1

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