First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book provides the latest information about the development of intersensory perception -- a topic which has recently begun to receive a great deal of attention from researchers studying the general problem of perceptual development. This interest was inspired after the realization that unimodal perception of sensory information is only the first stage of perceptual processing. Under normal conditions, an organism is faced with multiple, multisensory sources of information and its task is to either select a single relevant source of information or select several sources of information and integrate them. In general, perception and action on the basis of multiple sources of information is more efficient and effective. Before greater efficiency and effectiveness can be achieved, however, the organism must be able to integrate the multiple sources of information. By doing so, the organism can then achieve a coherent and unified percept of the world. The various chapters in this book examine the developmental origins of intersensory perceptual capacities by presenting the latest research on the development of intersensory perceptual skills in a variety of different species. By adopting a comparative approach to this problem, this volume as a whole helps uncover similarities as well as differences in the mechanisms underlying the development of intersensory integration. In addition, it shows that there is no longer any doubt that intersensory interactions occur right from the beginning of the developmental process, that the nature of these intersensory interactions changes as development progresses, and that early experience contributes in important ways to these changes.

Lifespan human development is the study of all aspects of biological, physical, cognitive, socioemotional, and contextual development from conception to the end of life. In approximately 800 signed articles by experts from a wide diversity of fields, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Lifespan Human Development explores all individual and situational factors related to human development across the lifespan. Some of the broad thematic areas will include: Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood Aging Behavioral and Developmental Disorders Cognitive Development Community and Culture Early and Middle Childhood Education through the Lifespan Genetics and Biology Gender and Sexuality Life Events Mental Health through the Lifespan Research Methods in Lifespan Development Speech and Language Across the Lifespan Theories and Models of Development. This five-volume encyclopedia promises to be an authoritative, discipline-defining work for students and researchers seeking to become familiar with various approaches, theories, and empirical findings about human development broadly construed, as well as past and current research.

This volume on intersensory perception and sensory integration is the second volume of the series, Perception and Perceptual Development: A Critical Review Series. The topic of the volume is timely, for in recent years, many investigators have noted that information about any natural event is obtained by a perceiver from a variety of sources. Such an observation immediately leads to the question of how this information is synthesized and organized. Of course, the implication that there are several discrete input channels that must be processed has come under immediate attack by researchers such as the Gibsons. They find it extremely artificial to regard natural information as being cut up and requiring cementing. Nevertheless, the possibility that during ontogene sis, perception involves the integration of separate information has attracted the attention of scholars concerned with both normal and abnormal development. In the case of normal development, a lively controversy has arisen between those who believe perceptual develop ment goes from integration toward differentiation and those who hold the opposite view. In the case of abnormal psychological development such as learning disabilities, many workers have suggested that percep tual integration is at fault. In thinking about the issues raised in this volume, we are particularly indebted to our former teachers and colleagues: Eleanor and James Gibson, T. A. Ryan, Robert B. MacLeod, and Jerome Bruner. We are pleased to acknowledge the secretarial help of Karen Weeks in the preparation of this volume.

We perceive and understand our environment using many sensory systems-vision, touch, hearing, taste, smell, and proprioception. These multiple sensory modalities give us complementary sources of information about the environment. This book explores how we develop the ability to integrate our senses.

The book is concerned with the cognitive contributions to perception, that is, with the influence of attention, intention, or motor processes on performances in spatial and temporal tasks. The chapters deal with fundamental perceptual processes resulting from the simple localization of an object in space or from the temporal determination of an event within a series of events. Chapters are based on presentations given at the Symposium on the Cognitive Contributions to the Perception of Spatial and Temporal Events (September 7-9, 1998, Ohlstadt, Germany). Following each chapter are commentary pieces from other researchers in the field. At the meeting, contributors were encouraged to discuss their theoretical positions along with presenting empirical results and the book's commentary sections help to preserve the spirit and controversies of the symposium. The general topic of the book is split into three parts. Two sections are devoted to the perception of unimodal spatial and temporal events; and are accompanied by a third part on spatio-temporal processes in the domain of intermodal integration. The themes of the book are highly topical. There is a growing interest in studies both with healthy persons and with patients that focus on localization errors and dissociations in localizations resulting from different tasks. These errors lead to new concepts of how visual space is represented. Such deviations are not only observed in the spatial domain but in the temporal domain as well. Typical examples are errors in duration judgments or synchronization errors in tapping tasks. In addition, several studies indicate the influence of attention on both the timing and on the localization of dynamic events. Another intriguing question originates from well-known interactions between intermodal events, namely, whether these events are based on a single representation or whether different representations interact.

Vol. 8.