Feature integration across multimodal perception and action

Abstract

One of the most remarkable aspects of multimodal perception is its coherence. Our conscious perception is unified at any given moment, although we acquire information from diverse channels with distinct transduction mechanisms, and process it in different cortical areas not necessarily at the same time and pace. The problem of how the brain integrates the different types of information, which are processed in distinct cortical regions to a unified event, is referred to in literature as the binding problem (Triesman, 1996). The current thesis reflects a gradual inquest in order to reveal different aspects of the binding mechanism across multimodal perception and action. The empirical evidence suggests that feature integration emerges in a graded manner through intra and inter connections within and across modalities and domains, employing general principles (such as temporal overlap of feature activation), which capture the role of attention, salience and dominance among the features and the domains. Also, control processes are important in handling retrieved traces for efficient use. Nevertheless, the binding mechanism does not require a conscious or unified perception and unified perception is not the outcome of feature binding.