Given this developmental shift, the AVMMR may represent a less mature electrophysiological pattern of AV speech processing because it was associated with less time spent looking at the articulatory movements during speech. The maturational changes in the way auditory and visual information is processed by younger and older infants are reflected in developmentally transient ERP components, which are reliably elicited in younger infants but are not always observable in older infants and/or adults. For instance, the AVMMR recorded in 2-month-old infants by Bristow et al. (2009) was not observed in adults (G. Dehaene-Lambertz,

p38 MAPK pathway personal communication; see also Jääskeläinen et al., 2004), and an increase in the visual N290 component to static direct eye-gaze vs. averted eye-gaze reported in 4-month-old infants (Farroni et al., 2002) was not observed in 9-month-old learn more infants (Elsabbagh et al., 2009) or adults (Grice et al., 2005). In order to further explore the question of the developmental profile of the AVMMR neural response, a group of adults was also tested (see Control study S3 and Fig. S7). No AVMMR in response to either audiovisually incongruent (combination and fusion) stimuli was observed, confirming our hypothesis that this component indicates a less mature type of processing of AV conflict only in early infancy. [Note that the present study did

not employ an oddball paradigm used in previous adult studies (Saint-Amour et al., 2007; Hessler et al., 2013), where AVMMR was elicited in response to the deviant among repetitive standards and not to the AV violation per se. Therefore,

the absence of the AVMMR in the present study does not contradict the results of the above studies but, on the contrary, provides corroborative evidence that adults perceived the two incongruent conditions integrated.] It is not surprising therefore that while the AVMMR was observed at the group level in younger infants (4.5–5.5 months, Selleck Paclitaxel Kushnerenko et al., 2008; and 2-month-old, Bristow et al., 2009), it was only found in the present study in a subset of our infants, who demonstrated a less mature pattern of looking behaviour. It is important to note here that the group-averaged ERP results might obscure the meaningful individual differences in the level of maturation of multisensory processing in individual infants. Thus, it appears that the AVMMR is a developmentally transient ERP response that may begin to disappear around the age of 6–9 months, similar to mismatch positivity (or PC) in young infants (Morr et al., 2002; Kushnerenko, E., Van den Bergh, B.R.H., & Winkler, I. (under review)). The developmental decrease in the auditory PC during the first year of life was suggested to reflect decreasing sensitivity to less informative sensory cues, which was initially high in younger infants (Kushnerenko, E., Van den Bergh, B.R.H., & Winkler, I. (under review)).