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Abstract:
We perceive our natural environment via multiple senses.
How does our mind and brain integrate these diverse sensory
inputs into a coherent and unified percept? This
challenging and exciting question has been the focus of a
growing multidisciplinary community of researchers that
meet regularly at the annual meeting of the International
Multisensory Research Forum (IMRF). The IMRF meeting
brings together researchers that investigate multisensory
integration at multiple levels of description ranging from
neurophysiology to behaviour, with research interests from
theory to applications. Traditionally, multisensory research
has focused on the characterization of the fundamental
principles and constraints that govern multisensory integration.
Research has then moved forward to address
questions of how multisensory integration emerges during
development and may be perturbed in cases of disease or
ageing. In the long-term, multisensory research will have
direct impact in translational studies investigating the
benefits of a multisensory environment for patients that are
impaired when presented with information in one sensory
modality alone. Obviously, this myriad of research topics
can only be addressed by combining findings from a
multitude of methods including psychophysics, neurophysiology
and non-invasive structural and functional
imaging in humans. Further, since its inception multisensory
research has constantly gained impetus from
computational models. Computational models contribute
substantially to the progress made in multisensory research
by providing a deeper understanding of the current
empirical findings and conversely making predictions that
guide future research. Most prominently, the normative
Bayesian perspective continues to inspire inquiries into the
optimality of multisensory integration across various
species.
This special issue on multisensory processing has
resulted from the IMRF meeting held at Liverpool University
in 2010. In accordance with previous procedures,
the call for papers was not restricted to meeting attendees
but was open to the entire multisensory community. As has
been the tradition since the first special IMRF issue, we
received a large number of high quality submissions
leading to strong competition. Many excellent submissions
had to be rejected or transferred to other special issues
because of space limitations. Nevertheless, we hope that
the collection of manuscripts included in this special issue
will provide a rich source of reference for the wider multisensory community.
Given the multidisciplinarity of the IMRF community,
the submitted manuscripts cover a range of the topics that
have briefly been highlighted above. For coarse reference,
we have grouped the manuscripts into five sections.
