These effects fall into two broad classes. In the meantime, experimental psychologists have contributed to our understanding of multimodal perception through investigations of the behavioral effects associated with it. It will probably require many more years of research before neuroscientists uncover all the details of the neural machinery involved in this unified experience. Rather, we perceive a unified world, regardless of the sensory modality through which we perceive it. Our intuitions about perception are consistent with this it does not seem as though our perception of events is constrained to the perception of each sensory modality independently. Behavioral Effects of Multimodal PerceptionĪlthough neuroscientists tend to study very simple interactions between neurons, the fact that they’ve found so many crossmodal areas of the cortex seems to hint that the way we experience the world is fundamentally multimodal. In other words, the information is combined and treated as a unitary representation of the world. Most of this research indicates that, at some point in perceptual processing, information from the various sensory modalities is integrated. The question is whether the various sources of information involved in this multimodal stimulus are processed separately by the perceptual system or not.įor the last few decades, perceptual research has pointed to the importance of multimodal perception: the effects on the perception of events and objects in the world that are observed when there is information from more than one sensory modality. In other words, your perception would be multimodal. Indeed, unless someone was to explicitly ask you to describe your perception in unimodal terms, you would most likely experience the event as a unified bundle of sensations from multiple senses. However, all of this information would be relevant to the same thing: your perception of the car collision. Your nose might even be stimulated by the smell of burning rubber or gasoline. Your ears would be stimulated with patterns of acoustic energy emanating from the collision. Your eyes would be stimulated with patterns of light energy bouncing off the cars involved. You could describe the stimulus generated by this event by considering each of the senses independently that is, as a set of unimodal stimuli. For example, imagine if you witnessed a car collision. Īlthough it has been traditional to study the various senses independently, most of the time, perception operates in the context of information supplied by multiple sensory modalities at the same time. The way we receive the information from the world is called sensation while our interpretation of that information is called perception. Animals that can have the same or similar representation, regardless of the means of peripheral reception, possess a great advantage in coping with the complex demands of living, especially in unusual circumstances in which one modality may be operating suboptimally when precise and accurate response is necessary on the basis of limited information or when cognitive manipulation is required.Figure 1.

The cross-modal perception of equivalence requires the derivation of a modality-independent representation, cognition, or the concept of a stimulus or event. On the basis of Geshwind's extensive neurological and theoretical work, he has stated that it cannot be argued that the ability to form cross-modal associations depends on already having speech, rather the ability to acquire speech has as a prerequisite the ability to form cross-modal associations and the ability to form cross-modal linkages was a necessary condition for the acquisition of language. However, what evolutionary occurrences could have accounted for this central elaboration is not yet known. An increased knowledge of cross-modal perception could provide a powerful tool to study the historically important and difficult question of central information processing in animals. A number of fundamental issues regarding cross-modal perception still require clarification. The importance of further research to the understanding of cross-modal functioning seems clear. This chapter discusses the significance of cross-modal perception.

Cross modal perception definition