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: lewkowic@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, (b) temporal processing, (c) sequence learning, and (d) perceptual narrowing. Our studies of intersensory perception 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. These studies ask whether multimodally specified information is perceived, learned, and discriminated more effectively than unimodally specified information. An underlying issue in our studies of intersensory perception 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 perception across a broad array of stimuli ranging from computer-generated objects and sounds to faces and voices. In our most recent work we have been investigating the intriguing possibility that infant perceptual tuning to multisensory inputs - especially faces and the vocalizations that they produce - is broader early in infancy and then narrows as infants become perceptual experts. Indeed, we have discovered that this is precisely what happens: Young infants are able to integrate the faces of monkeys and their vocalizations and can integrate nonnative speech contrasts whereas older infants no longer do. These findings show that perceptual narrowing is a general, pan-sensory process. 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).

Recent Representative Publications

Lewkowicz, D. J. and Ghazanfar, A. A. (2009). The emergence of multisensory systems through perceptual narrowing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Pons, F., Lewkowicz, D. J., Soto-Faraco, S., & Sebastian-Galles, N. (2009). Narrowing of intersensory speech perception in infancy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Zangenehpour, S., Ghazanfar, A. A., Lewkowicz, D. J., & Zatorre, R. J. (2009). Heterochrony and cross-species intersensory matching by infant vervet monkeys. Public Library of Science One, 4(1), e4302.

Lewkowicz, D.J., Leo, I., & Simion, F. (in press). Intersensory perception at birth: Newborns match non-human primate faces & voices. Infancy.

Lewkowicz, D. J. (in press). Infant perception of audio-visual speech synchrony. Developmental Psychology.

Lewkowicz, D. J. & Berent, I. (in press). Sequence Learning in 4 Month-Old Infants: Do Infants Represent Ordinal Information?. Child Development.

Marcovitch, S. & Lewkowicz, D. J. (2009). Sequence learning in infancy: The Independent contributions of conditional probability and pair frequency information. Developmental Science.

Lewkowicz, D. J. (2008). Perception of dynamic & static audiovisual sequences in 3- and 4-month-old infants. Child Development, 79, 1538-1554.

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.

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

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