The effect of attention on the temporal window of multisensory integration

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Everyday behaviour depends on the integration of sensory information from different sources. Consider the perceptual challenge of driving a car. You must use vision to scan the road, audition to listen for warning signals, touch to sense the tension on the steering wheel, and even your vestibular system is involved as you accelerate and turn corners. All of these senses bombard the perceptual system in real time and the brain must integrate related stimuli and segregate those that do not belong together. As our driving environments become even more information rich, this integration problem will grow. The present proposal examines the interaction between our limited capacity attention system and the temporal parameters of sensory integration. The brain uses relative timing, along with other cues, to decide if stimuli presented to different senses belong together, yet, the relative timing of those stimuli are affected by our allocation of attention. In particular, researchers have defined a temporal "window of integration" during which stimuli will be bound into a single event. The role of attention in determining the extent of this temporal window forms the main focus of this grant. Before attacking the problem directly, the different measures of the window need to be evaluated. Both direct conscious measures of temporal processing and indirect unconscious measures will be used to assess the temporal extent of the window. The grant can be broken down into two phases. The first defines the measures of sensory integration and determines how the different measures are related. The second, uses this knowledge to understand how attention affects the temporal properties of sensory integration. The findings from this research will be relevant to a number of applied areas: the development of multisensory warning signals in driving; the enhancement of tele-presence applications such as remote surgery; the improvement of video conferencing applications. More clinically, these findings will be relevant to understanding developmental dyslexia and some of the perceptual consequences of cerebral stroke.