The present study investigated the effects of focusing attention towards auditory or somatosensory stimuli on perceptual sensitivity and response bias using a signal detection task. Participants (N = 44) performed an unspeeded detection task in which weak (individually calibrated) somatosensory or auditory stimuli were delivered. The focus of attention was manipulated by the presentation of a v...

A major goal in perceptual neuroscience is to understand how signals from different sensory modalities are combined to produce stable and coherent representations. We previously investigated interactions between audition and touch, motivated by the fact that both modalities are sensitive to environmental oscillations. In our earlier study, we characterized the effect of auditory distractors on ...

New visuomotor skills can guide behaviour in novel situations. Prior studies indicate that learning a visuospatial sequence via responses based on manual key presses leads to effector- and response-independent knowledge. Little is known, however, about the extent to which new sequence knowledge can generalise, and, thereby guide behaviour, outside of the manual response modality. Here, we exami...

Calibration of perception to environmental properties typically requires experiences in addition to the perceptual task, such as feedback about performance. Recently, it has been shown that such experiences need not come from an external source or from a different perceptual modality. Rather, in some cases, a given perceptual modality can train itself. In this study, we sought to expand on the ...

Much research has explored how spoken word recognition is influenced by the architecture and dynamics of the mental lexicon (e.g., Luce and Pisoni, 1998; McClelland and Elman, 1986). A more recent question is whether the processes underlying word recognition are unique to the auditory domain, or whether visually perceived (lipread) speech may also be sensitive to the structure of the mental lex...

[Purpose] The interaction between the visual and tactile modalities influences on different levels from neural activity, perception, higher cognition to behavior. The aim of this study was to examine how a visual stimulus influences tactile sensitivity depending on temporal asynchrony. [Subjects and Methods] In total, 15 participants took part in this study. They were required to perform a two-...

Classical explanations for the modality effect-superior short-term serial recall of auditory compared to visual sequences-typically recur to privileged processing of information derived from auditory sources. Here we critically appraise such accounts, and re-evaluate the nature of the canonical empirical phenomena that have motivated them. Three experiments show that the standard account of mod...

In this paper, we tackle the problem of multimodal learning for autonomous robots. Autonomous robots interacting with humans in an evolving environment need the ability to acquire knowledge from their multiple perceptual channels in an unsupervised way. Most of the approaches in the literature exploit engineered methods to process each perceptual modality. In contrast, robots should be able to ...

There is much behavioral and neurophysiological evidence in support of the idea that seeing a tool activates motor components of action related to the perceived object (e.g., grasping, use manipulation). However, the question remains as to whether the processing of the motor components associated with the tool is automatic or depends on the situation, including the task and the modality of tool...

Similarity has been proposed as a fundamental principle underlying mental object representations and capable of supporting cognitive-level tasks such as categorization. However, much of the research has considered connections between similarity and categorization for tasks performed using a single perceptual modality. Considering similarity and categorization within a multimodal context opens u...