Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

4-25-2025

Keywords

attention, childhood, experiment, intersensory redundancy

Disciplines

Child Psychology | Developmental Psychology

Abstract

How does redundancy in the input affect the child’s attention? Consider, for example, a scenario in which the child is listening to a parent’s utterances, as well as watching the parent’s lips moving in synchrony with the speech. Intuitively, one might assume that there is an inherent advantage in such informational coherence. The match between sounds and visual input might help constrain attention in productive ways. Alternatively, a mismatch in intersensory information might affects attention negatively. The reality of how intersensory redundancy affects a child’s attention is more surprising than what intuition might suggest, as we discuss in this essay.

Download

Share

COinS