Closing Keynote Lecture
Crossmodal interactions in perception, memory and learning: on the scene and behind the scene Ladan Shams, Ph.D.UCLA Psychology Department What are the principles that govern crossmodal interactions? Comparing human observers’ multisensory perception with that of a Bayesian observer, we have found that humans’ multisensory perception is consistent with Bayesian inference both in determining when to combine the crossmodal information and how to combine them. The former problem is a type of causal inference. Causal inference, which has been largely studied in the context of cognitive reasoning, is in fact a critical problem in perception. Our Bayesian causal inference model accounts for a wide range of phenomena including a wide range of multisensory illusions, as well as counter-intuitive phenomena such as partial integration and negative gain. In accounting for both perception of…