The impact of attention on the temporal window of multisensory integration

任何知觉理论都必须解决一个基本问题，即大脑如何将感官信息结合在一起，形成一个连贯的现实。虽然关于视觉特征跨空间的绑定已知很多，但对来自不同形式的跨时间绑定刺激的了解要少得多。不同的感觉系统以不同的潜伏期对输入进行编码，从而产生一个时间“整合窗口”，在这个窗口内，多个感觉刺激可能被认为是单一的。众所周知，各种因素会使这个窗口变宽或变窄。在目前的工作中，我们将重点放在注意力因素上--这是一个可以显著缩短感官信号影响意识所需时间的因素。这项提议的中心问题是，注意力可能如何影响整合窗口的持续时间。

` Any theory of perception must tackle the fundamental problem of how the mind binds together sensory information into a coherent reality. Although a great deal is known about binding of visual features across space, much less is known about binding stimuli from different modalities across time. Different sensory systems encode inputs with different latencies, giving rise to a temporal "window of integration" within which multisensory stimuli may be perceived as unitary. Various factors are known to widen or narrow this window. In the present work, we focus on the factor of attention--a factor which can dramatically shorten the time required for a sensory signal to impact consciousness. The central question of this proposal is how attention may influence the duration of the integration window.