David J. Lewkowicz

Professor
Ph.D., City University of New York 1979
Research Area: Perceptual & Cognitive Development

Contact Information:
Office: 212 Behavioral Science
Telephone: (561) 297- 1276
Fax: (561) 297-2160
E-mail: David.Lewkowicz@fau.edu

General Research Interests

My laboratory investigates perceptual and cognitive development in human infants and children. Current projects investigate the development of: (a) intersensory perception and integration, (b) temporal processing, (c) sequence learning, and (d) perceptual narrowing. Our studies of intersensory integration examine when and how the perception of audio-visual equivalence relations based on such temporal attributes as synchrony, duration, temporal rate, and rhythm develops. Other related studies ask whether multisensory redundancy plays a special role in the development of perceptual learning and discrimination (i.e., is multimodally specified information learned and discriminated more effectively than unimodally specified information). An underlying issue in our studies of intersensory integration is whether intersensory integration processes are general across different domains or specific to particular ones. To address this issue, we investigate the development of intersensory integration across a broad array of stimuli ranging from computer-generated objects and sounds to faces and voices. In some of our most recent work we have discovered that even though infants can integrate faces and voices, their ability to do so declines and narrows with age. These findings show that even though perceptual narrowing is a general, pan-sensory process, it also appears to be domain-specific because it is limited to faces and voices. Finally, our current work on sequence learning investigates how the various temporal processing skills that we have discovered in our earlier work contribute to the development of sequence learning skills and how these, in turn, contribute to the development of other cognitive skills (e.g., the ability to perceive events and extract and understand their temporal structure).

Representative Publications

Lewkowicz, D. J. (2000). Development of intersensory temporal perception: An epigenetic systems/limitations view. Psychological Bulletin, 126 (2), 281-308.

Lewkowicz, D. J. (2002). Heterogeneity and heterochrony in the development of intersensory perception. Cognitive Brain Research, 14, 41-63.

Lewkowicz, D. J. (2003). Learning and discrimination of audiovisual events in human infants: The hierarchical relation between intersensory temporal synchrony and rhythmic pattern cues. Developmental Psychology, 39(5), 795-804.

Lewkowicz, D. J. (2004). Perception of serial order in infants. Developmental Science, 7, 175-184.

Lewkowicz, D. J. & Marcovitch, S. (2006). Perception of audiovisual rhythm and its invariance in 4- to 10-month-old infants. Developmental Psychobiology, 48, 288-300.

Lewkowicz, D. J. & Ghazanfar, A. A. (2006). The decline of cross-species intersensory perception in human infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA,103, 6771-6774.

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