台大心理系

When watching a film or eating a meal, for example, these everyday activities involve different senses working together. In order to make sense of the noisy multisensory world in which we find ourselves, our brains infer which sensory signals originate from the same source and integrate them in an optimal fashion. In this talk, I will introduce two critical factors—temporal synchrony and semantic congruency—that facilitate multisensory integration process, and how this process changes with other functions during development. I will demonstrate the typical development of multisensory simultaneity perception and the outcomes of atypical development caused by early sensory deprivation. During aging, the degeneration of multisensory simultaneity perception is associated with worse working memory and mobility. I will also demonstrate young infants’ learning of audiovisual associations and how this process builds on intrinsic correspondences between crossmodal stimuli. My current directions are to further investigate the malleability of multisensory perception and natural constraints on multisensory integration during development. My research highlights the changes of capacity and plasticity of the human brain and how it is adapted to and shaped by the environment in the course of lifespan development.