Multisensory Processes: A Balancing Act across the Lifespan

By Micah M. Murray, David J. Lewkowicz, Amir Amedi, Mark T. Wallace. 2016

206 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Multisensory processes are fundamental in scaffolding perception, cognition, learning and behaviour. 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 in multisensory function across two timescales: one long-term that operates across the lifespan and one short-term that operates during the learning of new multisensory relations. In addition, we highlight the importance of task contingencies. We conclude that these highly dynamic multisensory processes, based on the relative weighting of stimulus characteristics and learned associations, provide both stability and flexibility to brain functions over a wide range of temporal scales.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology, Neuroscience, Cognitive Science & Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Continual Lifelong Learning with Neural Networks: A Review (2018, background): “For instance, bottom-up processing is responsible for encoding the co-occurrence statistics of the environment while error-driven signals modulate this feedforward process according to top-down, task-specific factors (Murray et al., 2016).”
Lifelong Learning of Spatiotemporal Representations With Dual-Memory Recurrent Self-Organization (2018, background): “Since birth, animals are immersed in a highly dynamic environment which provides a wealth of experiences and where the learning and integration of information across time is a critical component shaping perception, cognition, and behavior (Skinner, 1958; Chaudhuri et al., 2015; Murray et al., 2016).”
Assessing the Role of the ‘Unity Assumption’ on Multisensory Integration: A Review (2017, background): “The formation of a unity assumption (and so, a new prior) that can influence human perception rapidly or over a longer time scale needs to take the human developmental trajectory and brain plasticity into consideration (see Murray et al., 2016).”