Atypical sensory processing has recently gained much research interest as a key domain of autistic symptoms. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit difficulties in processing the temporal aspects of sensory inputs, and show altered behavioural responses to sensory stimuli (i.e., sensory responsiveness). The present study examined…

Autism is associated with differences in sensory processing and motor coordination. Evidence from electroencephalography suggests individual perturbation evoked response (PER) components represent specific aspects of postural disturbance processing; P1 reflects the detection and N1 reflects the evaluation of postural instability. Despite the…

Although hearing often declines with age, prior research has shown that older adults may benefit from multisensory input to a greater extent when compared to younger adults, a concept known as inverse effectiveness. While there is behavioral evidence in support of this phenomenon, less is known about its neural basis. The present functional MRI…

The function of consciousness was explored in two contexts of audio-visual speech, cross-modal visual attention guidance and McGurk cross-modal integration. Experiments 1, 2, and 3 utilized a novel cueing paradigm in which two different flash suppressed lip-streams cooccured with speech sounds matching one of these streams. A visual target was…

A series of studies on newborns' abilities for recognizing speaking faces has been performed in order to identify the fundamental cues of social cognition. We used audiovisual dynamic faces rather than photographs or patterns of faces. Direct eye gaze and speech addressed to newborns, in interactive situations, appear to be two good candidates for…

The integrated use of spatial and temporal information seems to support the separation of two sensory streams. The present study tested whether this facilitation depends on the encoding of sensory stimuli in externally anchored spatial coordinate systems. Fifty-nine children between 5 and 12 years as well as 12 young adults performed a crossmodal…

The authors examined the effects of a task-irrelevant sound on visual processing. Participants were presented with revolving clocks at or around central fixation and reported the hand position of a target clock at the time an exogenous cue (1 clock turning red) or an endogenous cue (a line pointing toward 1 of the clocks) was presented. A…

Environmental events produce many sensory cues for identifying the action that evoked the event, the agent that performed the action, and the object targeted by the action. The cues for identifying environmental events are usually distributed across multiple sensory systems. Thus, to understand how environmental events are recognized requires an…

During natural viewing, the trajectories of saccadic eye movements often deviate dramatically from a straight-line path between objects. In human studies, saccades have been shown to deviate toward or away from salient visual distractors depending on visual- and goal-related parameters, but the neurophysiological basis for this is not well…

Two experiments investigated whether visual cues influence spatial reference frame selection for locations learned through touch. Participants experienced visual cues emphasizing specific environmental axes and later learned objects through touch. Visual cues were manipulated and haptic learning conditions were held constant. Imagined perspective…

The experiments conducted aimed to investigate whether reduced accuracy when counting stimuli presented in rapid temporal sequence in adults with dyslexia could be explained by a sensory processing deficit, a general slowing in processing speed or difficulties shifting attention between stimuli. To achieve these aims, the influence of the…

The formation of new perceptual categories involves learning to extract that information from a wide range of often noisy sensory inputs, which is critical for selecting between a limited number of responses. To identify brain regions involved in visual classification learning under noisy conditions, we developed a task on the basis of the…

We investigate non-verbal communication through expressive body movement and musical sound, to reveal higher cognitive processes involved in the integration of emotion from multiple sensory modalities. Participants heard, saw, or both heard and saw recordings of a Stravinsky solo clarinet piece, performed with three distinct expressive styles:…

We live in a multisensory world and one of the challenges the brain is faced with is deciding what information belongs together. Our ability to make assumptions about the relatedness of multisensory stimuli is partly based on their temporal and spatial relationships. Stimuli that are proximal in time and space are likely to be bound together by…

The ability to predict the effects of actions is necessary to behave properly in our physical and social world. Here, we describe how the ability to predict the consequence of complex gestures can change the way we integrate sight and sound when relevant visual information is missing. Six drummers and six novices were asked to judge audiovisual…