Comparing infants' preference for correlated audiovisual speech with signal-level computational models.

How much of infant behaviour can be accounted for by signal-level analyses of stimuli? The current paper directly compares the moment-by-moment behaviour of 8-month-old infants in an audiovisual preferential looking task with that of several computational models that use the same video stimuli as presented to the infants. One type of model utilizes only signal-level properties of visual motion whereas the other adds audiovisual integration (either through correlation or instantaneous addition of audio and visual signals). Together these models account for a significant portion of the variance in infant looking.