The rubber hand illusion (RHI) paradigm--in which illusory bodily ownership is induced by synchronous tactile stimulation of a participant's (hidden) hand and a (visible) surrogate--allows one to investigate how the brain resolves conflicting multisensory evidence during perceptual inference. To identify the functional anatomy of the RHI, we used multichannel EEG, acquired under three condition...

Developmental vision is deemed to be necessary for the maturation of multisensory cortical circuits. Thus far, this has only been investigated in animal studies, which have shown that congenital visual deprivation markedly reduces the capability of neurons to integrate cross-modal inputs. The present study investigated the effect of transient congenital visual deprivation on the neural mechanis...

Multisensory interactions are observed in species from single-cell organisms to humans. Important early work was primarily carried out in the cat superior colliculus and a set of critical parameters for their occurrence were defined. Primary among these were temporal synchrony and spatial alignment of bisensory inputs. Here, we assessed whether spatial alignment was also a critical parameter fo...

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...

Multisensory processes permit combinations of several inputs, coming from different sensory systems, allowing for a coherent representation of biological events and facilitating adaptation to environment. For these reasons, their application in neurological and neuropsychological rehabilitation has been enhanced in the last decades. Recent studies on animals and human models have indicated that...

Social animals learn to perceive their social environment, and their social skills and preferences are thought to emerge from greater exposure to and hence familiarity with some social signals rather than others. Familiarity appears to be tightly linked to multisensory integration. The ability to differentiate and categorize familiar and unfamiliar individuals and to build a multisensory repres...

When a single brief visual flash is accompanied by two auditory bleeps, it is frequently perceived incorrectly as two flashes. Here, we used high field functional MRI in humans to examine the neural basis of this multisensory perceptual illusion. We show that activity in retinotopic visual cortex is increased by the presence of concurrent auditory stimulation, irrespective of any illusory perce...

The visual and auditory systems often concur to create a unified perceptual experience and to determine the localization of objects in the external world. Co-occurring auditory and visual stimuli in spatial coincidence are known to enhance performance of auditory localization due to the integration of stimuli from different sensory channels (i.e. multisensory integration). However, auditory loc...

Synchronous, but not asynchronous, multisensory stimulation has been successfully employed to manipulate the experience of body ownership, as in the case of the rubber hand illusion. Hence, it has been assumed that the rubber hand illusion is bound by the same temporal rules as in multisensory integration. However, empirical evidence of a direct link between the temporal limits on the rubber ha...

Many studies have investigated the evidence for tactile and visual interactive responses to activation of various brain regions. However, few studies have reported on the effects of visuo-tactile multisensory integration on the amount of brain activation on the somatosensory cortical regions. The aim of this study was to examine whether coincidental information obtained by tactile stimulation c...