Development of cross-modal processing.

The ability to process and integrate cross-modal input is important for many everyday tasks. The current paper reviews theoretical and empirical work examining cross-modal processing with a focus on recent findings examining infants' and children's processing of arbitrary auditory-visual pairings. The current paper puts forward a potential mechanism that may account for modality dominance effects found in a variety of cognitive tasks. The mechanism assumes that although early processing of auditory and visual input is parallel, attention is allocated in a serial manner with the modality that is faster to engage attention dominating later processing. Details of the mechanism, factors influencing processing of arbitrary auditory-visual pairings, and implications for higher-order tasks are discussed.