Multisensory Perception And Communication

Infants learn to communicate through everyday social interaction with their caregivers in a multisensory world involving sight, hearing, touch and smell. The neural and behavioural underpinnings of caregiver-infant multisensory interaction and communication, however, have remained largely unexplored in research across disciplines. This book highlights this largely uncharted territory to better understand the developmental origins of human multisensory perception and communication. It emphasizes the range and complexity of multisensory infant-caregiver interaction in the real world, and its developmental and neurophysiological characteristics. Furthermore, recent theories of brain development suggest that brain, body and the environment interact with one another on an ongoing basis, influencing each other and are constantly being influenced by each other. This volume aims to elucidate the neurophysiological, behavioural and environmental factors to better understand the nature of multisensory communication as a whole. This book was originally published as a special issue of Developmental Neuropsychology.

It has become accepted in the neuroscience community that perception and performance are quintessentially multisensory by nature. Using the full palette of modern brain imaging and neuroscience methods, The Neural Bases of Multisensory Processes details current understanding in the neural bases for these phenomena as studied across species, stages of development, and clinical statuses. Organized thematically into nine sub-sections, the book is a collection of contributions by leading scientists in the field. Chapters build generally from basic to applied, allowing readers to ascertain how fundamental science informs the clinical and applied sciences. Topics discussed include: Anatomy, essential for understanding the neural substrates of multisensory processing Neurophysiological bases and how multisensory stimuli can dramatically change the encoding processes for sensory information Combinatorial principles and modeling, focusing on efforts to gain a better mechanistic handle on multisensory operations and their network dynamics Development and plasticity Clinical manifestations and how perception and action are affected by altered sensory experience Attention and spatial representations The last sections of the book focus on naturalistic multisensory processes in three separate contexts: motion signals, multisensory contributions to the perception and generation of communication signals, and how the perception of flavor is generated. The text provides a solid introduction for newcomers and a strong overview of the current state of the field for experts.

Scholars interested in communication theory, media theory, and multimodality will discover new ideas within this text by current philosophers, while scholars of sensory studies will learn how their field can be extended to communication and media.

We perceive and understand our environment using many sensory systems-vision, touch, hearing, taste, smell, and proprioception. These multiple sensory modalities give us complementary sources of information about the environment. This book explores how we develop the ability to integrate our senses.

The way that we interact with the environment on a daily basis is inherently multisensory. Even a simple task such as judging the location of a light in a dark room depends not only on vision but also on proprioceptive cues about the position of our body in space. The way that we experience food can be influenced not just by taste and smell, but by visual and auditory cues. Perception: A multisensory perspective adopts a multisensory approach to understanding perception. Rather than discussing each sense separately, this book defines perception as intrinsically multisensory from the start and examines multisensory interactions as the key process behind how we perceive our own body, control its movements, and perceive and recognise objects, space, and time. But the book delves even deeper. It discusses multisensory processing in conditions such as synaesthesia. It addresses attention and the role of multisensory processing in learning. By focussing on these domains, the authors highlight and identify general principles in the field of perception study and introduce models, experimental methods and pathologies that will be of interest to all those studying within the field of perception. The authors also illustrate applications that will be of interest to professionals whose work takes multisensory processing into account. As an introduction to the topic of multisensory perception, Perception: A multisensory perspective will be essential reading for students, from advanced undergraduate level through to postgraduate level in psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience. Those studying physiotherapy and neurological rehabilitation, human-computer interface development, or the design of products or services will also find this book of interest.

Research is suggesting that rather than our senses being independent, perception is fundamentally a multisensory experience. This handbook reviews the evidence and explores the theory of broad underlying principles that govern sensory interactions, regardless of the specific senses involved.

Scholars interested in communication theory, media theory, and multimodality will discover new ideas within this text by current philosophers, while scholars of sensory studies will learn how their field can be extended to communication and media.

The major reference work for a rapidly advancing field synthesizes central themes, reports on current findings, and offers a blueprint for future research. Scientists' attempts to understand the physiology underlying our apprehension of the physical world was long dominated by a focus on the individual senses. The 1980s saw the beginning of systematic efforts to examine interactions among different sensory modalities at the level of the single neuron. And by the end of the 1990s, a recognizable and multidisciplinary field of "multisensory processes" had emerged. More recently, studies involving both human and nonhuman subjects have focused on relationships among multisensory neuronal ensembles and their behavioral, perceptual, and cognitive correlates. The New Handbook of Multisensory Processing synthesizes the central themes in this rapidly developing area, reports on current findings, and offers a blueprint for future research. The contributions, all of them written for this volume by leading experts, reflect the evolution and current state of the field. This handbook does more than simply review the field. Each of the volume's eleven sections broadly surveys a major topic, and each begins with a substantive and thought-provoking commentary by the section editor that identifies the major issues being explored, describes their treatment in the chapters that follow, and sets these findings within the context of the existing body of knowledge. Together, the commentaries and chapters provide an invaluable guide to areas of general agreement, unresolved issues, and topics that remain to be explored in this fast-moving field.