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5.2.1: Learning Objectives and Introduction

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    Learning Objectives
    • Define the basic terminology and basic principles of multimodal perception.
    • Describe the neuroanatomy of multisensory integration and name some of the regions of the cortex and midbrain that have been implicated in multisensory processing.
    • Explain the difference between multimodal phenomena and crossmodal phenomena.
    • Give examples of multimodal and crossmodal behavioral effects.

    Perception: Unified

    Although it has been traditional to study the various senses independently, most of the time, perception operates in the context of information supplied by multiple sensory modalities at the same time. For example, imagine if you witnessed a car collision. You could describe the stimulus generated by this event by considering each of the senses independently; that is, as a set of unimodal stimuli. Your eyes would be stimulated with patterns of light energy bouncing off the cars involved. Your ears would be stimulated with patterns of acoustic energy emanating from the collision. Your nose might even be stimulated by the smell of burning rubber or gasoline.

    Black and White car accident .png

    If you were a witness to this scene you'd be able to describe it using input from many of your senses. Your experience would be multimodal. [Image: Photo Grrrrr, https://goo.gl/dzfKs8, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, https://goo.gl/Toc0ZF]

    However, all of this information would be relevant to the same thing: your perception of the car collision. Indeed, unless someone was to explicitly ask you to describe your perception in unimodal terms, you would most likely experience the event as a unified bundle of sensations from multiple senses. In other words, your perception would be multimodal. The question is whether the various sources of information involved in this multimodal stimulus are processed separately by the perceptual system or not.

    For the last few decades, perceptual research has pointed to the importance of multimodal perception: the effects on the perception of events and objects in the world that are observed when there is information from more than one sensory modality. Most of this research indicates that, at some point in perceptual processing, information from the various sensory modalities is integrated. In other words, the information is combined and treated as a unitary representation of the world.

    Multi-Modal Perception by Lorin Lachs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available in our Licensing Agreement.

    This page titled 5.2.1: Learning Objectives and Introduction is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Michael Miguel.