The Psychology of Multimodal Perception

Abstract

Sensory modalities are classically distinguished based on the type of physical stimulation that they are most sensitive to: light for vision, sound for hearing, skin pressure for touch, molecules in air for smell, etc. Research on perception has generally considered each sensory modality in isolation. But most things that happen in the normal environment produce stimulation to several modalities simultaneously. The existence of valid co-occurrences of information in different sensory modalities creates, for perceiving systems – whether natural or artificial – opportunities for improved performance. Research with both humans and animals has identified many cases of crossmodal interaction in which the interpretation of data in one sensory modality is influenced by the data that are available in another sensory modality, thus showing that biological organisms effectively take advantage of the potential for intermodal redundancy. Work in this area has proceeded at both the behavioural and the psychological levels. This chapter focuses on behavioural evidence from humans.

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