Normal sensory experience is necessary for the development of multisensory processing, such that disruption through environmental manipulations eliminates or alters multisensory integration. In this Neuro Forum, we examine the recent paper by Xu et al. (J Neurosci 32: 2287-2298, 2012) which proposes that the statistics of cross-modal stimuli encountered early in life might be a driving factor f...

Abstract Snow depth estimation is an important parameter that guides several hydrological applications and climate change prediction. Despite advances in remote sensing technology enhanced satellite observations, the of snow at local scale still requires improved accuracy flexibility. The ubiquitous wearable promote new prospects tackling this challenge. In paper, a IoT platform exploits pressu...

It has recently been demonstrated that the maturation of normal multisensory circuits in the cortex of the cat takes place over an extended period of postnatal life. Such a finding suggests that the sensory experiences received during this time may play an important role in this developmental process. To test the necessity of sensory experience for normal cortical multisensory development, cats...

When I am looking at my coffee machine that makes funny noises, this is an instance of multisensory perception - I perceive this event by means of both vision and audition. But very often we only receive sensory stimulation from a multisensory event by means of one sense modality, for example, when I hear the noisy coffee machine in the next room, that is, without seeing it. The aim of this pap...

Multisensory integration and crossmodal attention have a large impact on how we perceive the world. Therefore, it is important to know under what circumstances these processes take place and how they affect our performance. So far, no consensus has been reached on whether multisensory integration and crossmodal attention operate independently and whether they represent truly automatic processes...

Sarko DK, Ghose D. Developmental plasticity of multisensory circuitry: how early experience dictates cross-modal interactions. J Neurophysiol 108: 2863–2866, 2012. First published July 11, 2012; doi:10.1152/jn.00383.2012.—Normal sensory experience is necessary for the development of multisensory processing, such that disruption through environmental manipulations eliminates or alters multisenso...

The majority of multisensory neurons in the cat superior colliculus (SC) are able to synthesize cross-modal cues (e.g., visual and auditory) and thereby produce responses greater than those elicited by the most effective single modality stimulus and, sometimes, greater than those predicted by the arithmetic sum of their modality-specific responses. The present study examined the role of cortico...

BACKGROUND Behavioral studies in both human and animals generally converge to the dogma that multisensory integration improves reaction times (RTs) in comparison to unimodal stimulation. These multisensory effects depend on diverse conditions among which the most studied were the spatial and temporal congruences. Further, most of the studies are using relatively simple stimuli while in everyday...