Summary

Sensory inputs are integrated in multiple ways allowing to perceive unity and disambiguate between interpretations of the environment, attesting to the importance of this process. This might be considered particularly challenging for newborns and infants, who lack extensive experience with the environment. On the contrary, the presence of multimodal information may reveal the existence of cognitive abilities that go beyond simple reflexes or a meaningless structuring of the environment, even from birth. First the fetus in a limited way, and then the newborn with all functional senses, exploits the varied richness of stimulation to make sense of, and increase adaptation to, the environment, and foster learning of the most relevant information.

While the newborn is ready to adapt to a multimodal environment, their senses are still immature and will further develop for a better comprehension and adjustment of their actions. The development of intersensory interactions during the first year reveals this remarkable adaptation process. The fetal stage prepares the neonatal stage for the complexity of the environment. Although vision is fully functional only from birth, recent methods in developmental psychology have revealed the relationships between vision and hearing, and between vision and touch at birth. Intersensory interactions shed light on early humans’ ability to abstract and link relevant information in order to restore unity to the received stimulation and enable infants to represent abstract concepts such as numerical quantity and links to spatial and temporal dimensions.