abstract Tömme Noesselt

Tömme Noesselt (Lehrstuhl für Biopsychologie, Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg, Deutschland)

Neural underpinnings and behavioral consequences of multisensory interplay

Many events in the real world stimulate more than one sense; thus information transfer across senses can lead to more robust and reliable representations of our environment. This intersensory integration into single objects/events is often governed by spatial and temporal stimulus coincidences. The first part of this talk will focus on the neural underpinnings and temporal dynamics of audiovisual temporal coincidence detection and on perceptual illusions caused by temporal alignment of non-coincident stimuli (‘auditory driving’). The second part will highlight the neural basis of the spatial ventriloquist illusion plus the influence of top-down spatial and temporal task-demands on audiovisual integration processes. In a third part we will look into the behavioral effects of audiovisual and audiotactile stimulation on visual and auditory perceptual sensitivity. The results of our studies demonstrate the involvement of putatively sensory-specific cortices and even sensory-specific thalamic nuclei in multisensory integration and thus challenge the traditional parcellation of the human brain into lower-level sensory-specific processing streams and higher-level heteromodal association cortices.