Multisensory Perception & Integration

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Abstractions about cross-modal perception, temporal binding, perceptual expectations, visual memory, auditory–visual effects, and multisensory learning.

11 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Bezold Effect — The color-perception phenomenon in which a target's apparent hue shifts toward a finely interspersed surround rather than away from it — assimilation, gated by whether the surround falls inside the visual system's spatial integration window.
• Kappa effect — A psychophysical illusion in which the perceived duration between two stimuli lengthens when they are farther apart in space and shortens when closer, because the perceptual system reconstructs elapsed time from spatial layout under an implicit constant-velocity prior.
• McGurk effect — Show that speech perception is intrinsically multimodal: a face articulating /ga/ over an audio /ba/ is heard as /da/, because the auditory and visual streams are fused into a single percept — by reliability-weighted, coherence-gated combination — before the result reaches awareness.
• Multisensory learning — An instructional approach presenting coordinated material through more than one sensory modality so learners can integrate complementary representations.
• Perceptual Set — Explain how prior expectation, context, motivation, or expertise biases what is perceived from ambiguous or degraded input — the percept is the prior weighted by how decisive the sensory evidence is, so the expectation dominates precisely when the stimulus underdetermines it.
• Precedence Effect — When two copies of a sound arrive within a short critical window (~1–40 ms), the auditory system localizes the fused percept entirely by the first-arriving wavefront and discounts the lagging copy's spatial claim, while still letting it contribute to loudness and timbre.
• Predictive Remapping — Explain trans-saccadic visual stability by having visuospatial neurons shift their receptive fields to a stimulus's future post-saccadic retinal position before the eyes move — driven by an efference copy of the saccade command, so the eyes land on an already-built representation.
• Simon Effect — Explain why responses are faster when a stimulus's task-irrelevant spatial location matches the response side: the perceptual system pre-attentively generates a same-side response code that facilitates selection when it agrees with the task-mandated code and costs ~30 ms when it conflicts.
• Temporal Binding — Bind events that fall within a characteristic time window into a single perceived unit by attributing them to a shared source, warping subjective time and location to keep the percept consistent with that attribution.
• Ventriloquism Effect — A sound is mislocalised toward a synchronised visual event when the brain infers a common cause, because vision's lower spatial uncertainty pulls the merged location estimate toward it by inverse-variance weighting — gated by temporal and spatial binding windows beyond which the percept splits.
• Visual Memory — Encoding, retaining, and retrieving visually derived representations across iconic, working-memory, and long-term regimes while preserving selected spatial, feature, object, and scene information.