Given that multiple senses are often stimulated at the same time, perceptual awareness is most likely to take place in multisensory situations. However, theories of awareness are based on studies and models established for a single sense (mostly vision). Here, we consider the methodological and theoretical challenges raised by taking a multisensory perspective on perceptual awareness. First, we...

Convergence of afferents from different sensory modalities has generally been thought to produce bimodal (and trimodal) neurons (i.e., exhibit suprathreshold excitation to more than 1 sensory modality). Consequently, studies identifying cross-modal connections assume that such convergence results in bimodal (or trimodal) neurons that produce familiar forms of multisensory integration: response ...

The new DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) include sensory disturbances in addition to the well-established language, communication, and social deficits. One sensory disturbance seen in ASD is an impaired ability to integrate multisensory information into a unified percept. This may arise from an underlying impairment in which individuals with ASD have difficulty per...

In this review, we evaluate the neurophysiological, neuropsychological, and psychophysical evidence relevant to the claim that multisensory information is processed differently depending on the region of space in which it happens to be presented. We discuss how the majority of studies of multisensory interactions in the depth plane that have been conducted to date have focused on visuotactile a...

This paper introduces Functional Analytic Multisensory Environmental Therapy (FAMSET) for use with elders with dementia while using a multisensory environment/snoezelen room. The model introduces behavioral theory and practice to the multisensory environment treatment, addressing assessment, and, within session techniques, integrating behavioral interventions with emotion-oriented care. A modul...

Integrating the multisensory features of talking faces is critical to learning and extracting coherent meaning from social signals. While we know much about the development of these capacities at the behavioral level, we know very little about the underlying neural processes. One prominent behavioral milestone of these capacities is the perceptual narrowing of face–voice matching, whereby young...

The sonification of human movement data is a new approach to support motor perception, motor control and learning in sports and rehabilitation. Perceptual and motor control mechanisms both benefit of additional acoustic information, both are performing more accurate compared to unimodal conditions. But how does movement sonification work when supporting perception and action especially when pro...

Learning processes which take place during the development of a biological nervous system enable it to extract mappings between external stimuli and its internal state. Precise egomotion estimation is essential to keep these external and internal cues coherent given the rich multisensory environment. In this paper we present a learning model which, given various sensory inputs, converges to a s...

Intersensory redundancy can facilitate animal and human behavior in areas as diverse as rhythm discrimination, signal detection, orienting responses, maternal call learning, and associative learning. In the realm of numerical development, infants show similar sensitivity to numerical differences in both the visual and auditory modalities. Using a habituation-dishabituation paradigm, we ask here...

For multisensory stimulation to effect perceptual and behavioral responses, information from the different sensory systems must converge on individual neurons. A great deal is already known regarding processing within the separate sensory systems, as well as about many of the integrative and perceptual/behavioral effects of multisensory processing. However, virtually nothing is known about the ...