Multisensory Integration

Question 1

Compartmental Brain:

Answer 1

• brain divided into different parts with different functions
• labels have changed, but paradigm hasn’t
• people started to notice that there were interactions between different brain parts

Question 2

Paradigm Shift

Answer 2

Traditional Paradigm → Emerging Paradigm

• Traditional paradigm: modular, bottom up, vision dominant
• Emerging paradigm: integrative, non hierarchical, perception is multi sensory in many domains

Question 3

Modularity in the brain

Answer 3

Vision: the dominant sensory modality

When conflict between modalities: Vision dominates and modifies perception (E.g., Ventriloquism effect, visual capture)

Question 4

Interactions between modalities

Answer 4

Change of Visual Percept by Other Modalities?

1) Change in temporal characteristics
2) Enhancement of spatial attention by auditory or tactile stimuli
3) Visual Intensity enhancement
4) Disambiguate direction of motion

Question 5

Visual Capture

Answer 5

partial conflict between vision and proprioception

•  Vision dominates

Question 6

Proprioception

Answer 6

the unconscious perception of movement and spatial orientation arising from stimuli within the body itself. In humans, these stimuli are detected by nerves within the body itself, as well as by the semicircular canals of the inner ear

Question 7

Ventriloquist Illusion

Answer 7

the auditory information is coming from puppeteer but the puppet captures the visual, we perceive the sound to be coming from the puppet
clear dominance of visual modality over auditory modality
going to movies, ventriloquist illusion

Question 8

McGurk Effect:

Answer 8

• ba vs pa (how we see the mouth move influences the sound we think we hear)
• an error in perception that occurs when we misperceive sounds because the audio and visual parts of the speech are mismatched

Question 9

Sound-induced flash illusion:

Answer 9

sound can make you perceive that a dot is flashing more than once if there are two tones playing while looking at the dot flashing
Visual illusion that is caused by sound

Question 10

Stream-bounce Illusion:

Answer 10

Two identical visual targets moving across each other can be perceived either to bounce off or to stream through each other.

Question 11

“Unisensory” cortical areas

Answer 11

A host of studies, using different techniques (fMRI, neuroanatomy, EEG, MEG, etc.) have now shown:

– cross-connectivity across sensory cortices
– cross modal interactions in a number of functions

Cross modal interactions are the rule not the exception
**The entire brain is multisensory

Question 12

Underlying Neural Circuitry In Monkeys

Answer 12

Extensive projections from primary auditory cortex and parabelt and STP to peripheral V1 area
-Projections from auditory parabelt regions to peripheral V1 and V2

Question 13

Benefits of Multisensory Processing

Answer 13

•   Improved Accuracy
•   Improved Precision
•   Improved reaction time
•   More complete information