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...

Multisensory processes are fundamental in scaffolding perception, cognition, learning, and behavior. How and when stimuli from different sensory modalities are integrated rather than treated as separate entities is poorly understood. We review how the relative reliance on stimulus characteristics versus learned associations dynamically shapes multisensory processes. We illustrate the dynamism i...

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...

Alloesthesia is a rare clinical condition that corresponds to a spatial disorder of stimulus localization, in which patients experience a given stimulus on the side opposite to the side of stimulation. Whereas it has been mostly described for unisensory stimulations, evidence of multisensory alloesthesia is only anecdotal. Here, we investigated a case of multisensory auditory-tactile alloesthes...

A single neuron is categorized as “multisensory” if there is a statistically significant difference between the response evoked by a cross-modal stimulus combination and that evoked by the most effective of its components individually. The most widely applied quantitative index expresses multisensory enhancement (or inhibition) as a proportion of the strongest unisensory response. However, it h...

We investigate the hypothesis that multisensory representations mediate the crossmodal transfer of shape knowledge across visual and haptic modalities. In our experiment, participants rated the similarities of pairs of synthetic 3-D objects in visual, haptic, cross-modal, and multisensory settings. Our results offer two contributions. First, we provide evidence for a single multisensory shape r...

Correlated sensory inputs coursing along the individual sensory processing hierarchies arrive at multisensory convergence zones in cortex where inputs are processed in an integrative manner. The exact hierarchical level of multisensory convergence zones and the timing of their inputs are still under debate, although increasingly, evidence points to multisensory integration (MSI) at very early s...

Multisensory interactions are a fundamental feature of brain organization. Principles governing multisensory processing have been established by varying stimulus location, timing and efficacy independently. Determining whether and how such principles operate when stimuli vary dynamically in their perceived distance (as when looming/receding) provides an assay for synergy among the above princip...