Multisensory Integration Develops Late in Humans

Abstract

From birth, we interact with the world through our senses, which provide complementary information about the environment. To perceive and interact with a coherent world, our brain has to merge information from the different senses as efœciently as possible. Because the same environmental property may be signaled by more than one sense, the brain must integrate redundant signals of a particular property (such as the size and shape of an object held in the hand), which can result in a more precise estimate than either individual estimate. Much behavioral, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging evidence has shown that signals from the different senses related to the same event, congruent in space and time, increase the accuracy and precision of its encoding well beyond what would be possible from independent estimates from individual senses. Several recent studies have suggested that human adults integrate redundant information in a statistically optimal fashion (e.g., Alais and Burr 2004; Ernst and Banks 2002; Trommershäuser et al. in press).