Symposium: Models of multisensory integration: synthetic vs. naturalistic situations?
Multiple Paper Presentation

Beatrice de Gelder
Tilburg Universitity

     Abstract ID Number: 17
     Last modified: May 30, 2006
     Presentation date: 06/20/2006 2:00 PM in Hamilton Building, McNeil Theatre
     (View Schedule)

Symposium Overview
Natural images are increasingly used at many levels of visual processing. The usefulness of such stimuli is now a matter of active debate. One side is motivated by the way evolutionary pressures shape the perceptual system and argues that simple, synthetic stimuli (such as bars, dots and gratings) are doomed to fail experiments intended to capture fundamental properties of visual neurons. The counterargument holds that natural images are too poorly understood to be useful for testing theories. To goal of this symposium is to start a similar debate in multisensory research in an attempt to arrive at a better understanding of these complex issues. In audiovisual research a large number of studies also use simple synthetic stimuli and the tacit assumption is that models (mathematical, functional) derived from experiments with simple stimuli can applied equally well to naturalistic stimulus combinations.

Major questions are:
1. What is the importance of using naturalistic stimuli for new models of multisensory integration and can we define a theoretical basis for a classification of types of multisensory situations.
2. What are the factors and computations involved in binding the signals from different modalities and are these different depending on whether synthetic or naturalistic stimuli are used?
3. Are naturalistic and synthetic stimuli integrated at different representational stage corresponding to different moments in time?

Papers in this Symposium:

• Alexandre Pouget
  Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester
  Neural basis of Bayes-optimal multisensory integration: theory and experiments
• Andrew King
  Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, University of Oxford
  Investigating multisensory convergence in the auditory cortex
• Maria Concetta Morrone
  Universita’ Vita-Salute S Raffaele, Milan Italy
  Predicting the spatial and temporal distortions caused by saccades.