University of California, San Diego
The Department of Psychology is Honored
to Present a Talk by
Ladan Shams
University of California, Los Angeles
"Visual Perception is Multisensory Perception"
Presented on October 20, 2005
Location: The Crick Conference Room
Mandler Hall, room 3545
- Abstract:
- Vision is generally considered the dominant sensory modality; self-contained and independent of other senses. In this talk I will present results that contradict this view, and show that visual perception can be strongly altered by sound, and this alteration can occur at early stages of processing, as early as primary visual cortex. I will then discuss the principles that may govern such crossmodal interactions. Comparing human observers' auditory-visual perception with that of a Bayesian ideal observer, we have found that humans' multimodal perception seems to follow Bayesian inference both in determining when to combine the crossmodal information and how to combine them. These results account for a wide range of data including two important auditory-visual illusions, and suggest that the observed auditory-visual interactions are overall functionally advantageous in general (despite the occasional non-veridical percepts manifested by illusions) by providing an optimal inference about the environment.
- About the Speaker:
- Research in our laboratory is concerned with the question of how the brain integrates the information from different sensory modalities into one coherent percept. We are interested in the question of multisensory integration from various aspects: how different sensory modalities interact; what brain mechanisms are involved, and what computational principles and mechanisms govern the interactions. We probe these questions using behavioral and neuroimaing studies in humans, as well as mathematical modeling.
- http://shamslab.psych.ucla.edu/
The website of Dr. Shams' laboratory. - http://shamslab.psych.ucla.edu/publications/
A list of Dr. Shams' published work.
