The impact of attention on the temporal window of multisensory integration

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` 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.