Causal inference in multisensory perception

Perceptual events derive their significance to an animal from their meaning about the world, that is from the information they carry about their causes. The brain should thus be able to efficiently infer the causes underlying our sensory events. Here we use multisensory cue combination to study caus...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2007-09, Vol.2 (9), p.e943-e943
Main Authors: Körding, Konrad P, Beierholm, Ulrik, Ma, Wei Ji, Quartz, Steven, Tenenbaum, Joshua B, Shams, Ladan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Auditory Perception - physiology
Auditory tasks
Bayes Theorem
Brain
Brain - physiology
Cognition
Cognition & reasoning
Computational Biology/Computational Neuroscience
Cues
Humans
Inference
Localization
Nervous system
Neurons, Afferent - physiology
Neurophysiology
Neuroscience
Neuroscience/Behavioral Neuroscience
Neuroscience/Cognitive Neuroscience
Neuroscience/Sensory Systems
Neuroscience/Theoretical Neuroscience
Perception
Population
Senescence
Sensory integration
Space Perception - physiology
Studies
Task Performance and Analysis
Trends
Variables
Visual perception
Visual Perception - physiology
Visual tasks
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Summary:Perceptual events derive their significance to an animal from their meaning about the world, that is from the information they carry about their causes. The brain should thus be able to efficiently infer the causes underlying our sensory events. Here we use multisensory cue combination to study causal inference in perception. We formulate an ideal-observer model that infers whether two sensory cues originate from the same location and that also estimates their location(s). This model accurately predicts the nonlinear integration of cues by human subjects in two auditory-visual localization tasks. The results show that indeed humans can efficiently infer the causal structure as well as the location of causes. By combining insights from the study of causal inference with the ideal-observer approach to sensory cue combination, we show that the capacity to infer causal structure is not limited to conscious, high-level cognition; it is also performed continually and effortlessly in perception.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0000943