Multisensory perception and action: development, decision-making, and neural mechanisms

Surrounded by multiple objects and events, receiving multisensory stimulation, our brain must sort through relevant and irrelevant multimodal signals to correctly decode and represent the information from the same and different objects and, respectively, events in the physical world. Over the last two decades, scientific interest has increased dramatically in how we integrate multisensory information and how we interact with a multisensory world, as evidenced by exponential growth of the relevant studies using behavioral and/or neuro-scientific approaches. The Special Issue topic of “Multisensory perception and action: psychophysics, neural mechanisms, and applications” emerged from a scientific meeting dedicated to these issues: the Munich Multisensory Perception Symposium held in Holzhausen am Ammersee, Germany (June 24–26, 2011). This volume, which collects research articles contributed by attendees of the symposium as well as the wider community, is organized into three interrelated sections: