Causal inference in perception

Shams, Ladan; Beierholm, Ulrik

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2010.07.001

Cited by 320 publications

(309 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…The finding implies that the degree to which a virtual environment is rendered affects bodily representation, or the bifurcation between the external environment and the body. Interestingly, Samad et al (2015), recently cast the rubber-hand illusion (RHI; Botvinick and Cohen, 1998) -an illusion whereby participants feel ownership over a fake hand after congruent visuosomatosensory stimulation-in light of Bayesian Casual Inference (Körding et al, 2007;Shams and Beierholm, 2010). Under this framework, localization of an object/organism in the environment depends on the relatively reliability of the sensory representation of that particular object/organism, as well as that of other objects/organisms present in the environment.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Peripersonal Space: An Index of Multisensory Body–Environment Interactions in Real, Virtual, and Mixed Realities

et al. 2018

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Human-environment interactions normally occur in the physical milieu and thus by medium of the body and within the space immediately adjacent to and surrounding the body, the peripersonal space (PPS). However, human interactions increasingly occur with or within virtual environments, and hence novel approaches and metrics must be developed to index human-environment interactions in virtual reality (VR). Here, we present a multisensory task that measures the spatial extent of human PPS in real, virtual, and augmented realities. We validated it in a mixed reality (MR) ecosystem in which real environment and virtual objects are blended together in order to administer and control visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli in ecologically valid conditions. Within this mixed-reality environment, participants are asked to respond as fast as possible to tactile stimuli on their body, while task-irrelevant visual or audiovisual stimuli approach their body. Results demonstrate that, in analogy with observations derived from monkey electrophysiology and in real environmental surroundings, tactile detection is enhanced when visual or auditory stimuli are close to the body, and not when far from it. We then calculate the location where this multisensory facilitation occurs as a proxy of the boundary of PPS. We observe that mapping of PPS via audiovisual, as opposed to visual alone, looming stimuli results in sigmoidal fits-allowing for the bifurcation between near and far space-with greater goodness of fit. In sum, our approach is able to capture the boundaries of PPS on a spatial continuum, at the individual-subject level, and within a fully controlled and previously laboratory-validated setup, while maintaining the richness and ecological validity of real-life events. The task can therefore be applied to study the properties of PPS in humans and to index the features governing human-environment interactions in virtual or MR. We propose PPS as an ecologically valid and neurophysiologically established metric in the study of the impact of VR and related technologies on society and individuals.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Peripersonal Space: An Index of Multisensory Body–Environment Interactions in Real, Virtual, and Mixed Realities

et al. 2018

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“…It would seem only natural, therefore, to consider how the notion of crossmodal correspondences might be modelled within such a framework as a form of prior knowledge. According to Marc Ernst (2006), the strength of crossmodal coupling is a function of our sensory system's prior knowledge that certain stimuli "go together" crossmodally: Such prior knowledge concerning the mapping between sensory signals can be modelled by a coupling prior (see also Roach et al, 2006;Shams & Beierholm, 2010;Shams, Ma, & Beierholm, 2005), representing the expected (i.e., a priori) joint distribution of the signals. In the case of bimodal integration, the prior distribution can be considered as a 2-D Gaussian distribution with infinite variance along the positive diagonal (the identity line).…”

Section: Explaining Crossmodal Correspondences In Terms Of Bayesian Pmentioning

confidence: 99%

Crossmodal correspondences: A tutorial review

Spence

2011

Atten Percept Psychophys

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In many everyday situations, our senses are bombarded by many different unisensory signals at any given time. To gain the most veridical, and least variable, estimate of environmental stimuli/properties, we need to combine the individual noisy unisensory perceptual estimates that refer to the same object, while keeping those estimates belonging to different objects or events separate. How, though, does the brain "know" which stimuli to combine? Traditionally, researchers interested in the crossmodal binding problem have focused on the roles that spatial and temporal factors play in modulating multisensory integration. However, crossmodal correspondences between various unisensory features (such as between auditory pitch and visual size) may provide yet another important means of constraining the crossmodal binding problem. A large body of research now shows that people exhibit consistent crossmodal correspondences between many stimulus features in different sensory modalities. For example, people consistently match high-pitched sounds with small, bright objects that are located high up in space. The literature reviewed here supports the view that crossmodal correspondences need to be considered alongside semantic and spatiotemporal congruency, among the key constraints that help our brains solve the crossmodal binding problem.

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“…In the following, I will explain how attention may influence this latter representational integration from the perspective of Bayesian causal inference (Körding et al, 2007;Rohe and Noppeney, 2015a, b;Shams and Beierholm, 2010). Bayesian causal inferences has recently been proposed as a normative model that describes how the brain should integrate and segregate sensory signals in the face of uncertainty about the causal structure of the world.…”

Section: Unmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Curious Incident of Attention in Multisensory Integration: Bottom-up vs. Top-down

et al. 2016

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The role attention plays in our experience of a coherent, multisensory world is still controversial. On the one hand, a subset of inputs may be selected for detailed processing and multisensory integration in a top-down manner, i.e., guidance of multisensory integration by attention. On the other hand, stimuli may be integrated in a bottom-up fashion according to low-level properties such as spatial coincidence, thereby capturing attention. Moreover, attention itself is multifaceted and can be described via both top-down and bottom-up mechanisms. Thus, the interaction between attention and multisensory integration is complex and situation-dependent. The authors of this opinion paper are researchers who have contributed to this discussion from behavioural, computational and neurophysiological perspectives. We posed a series of questions, the goal of which was to illustrate the interplay between bottom-up and top-down processes in various multisensory scenarios in order to clarify the standpoint taken by each author and with the hope of reaching a consensus. Although divergence of viewpoint emerges in the current responses, there is also considerable overlap: In general, it can be concluded that the amount of influence that attention exerts on MSI depends on the current task as * Equal contribution (ordered alphabetically). ** Equal contribution. *** To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: hartcher@isir.upmc.fr; Ruth.Adam@med.uni-muenchen.de Macaluso et al. / Multisensory Research (2016) well as prior knowledge and expectations of the observer. Moreover stimulus properties such as the reliability and salience also determine how open the processing is to influences of attention.

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Causal inference in perception

Cited by 320 publications

References 42 publications

Peripersonal Space: An Index of Multisensory Body–Environment Interactions in Real, Virtual, and Mixed Realities

Peripersonal Space: An Index of Multisensory Body–Environment Interactions in Real, Virtual, and Mixed Realities

Crossmodal correspondences: A tutorial review

The Curious Incident of Attention in Multisensory Integration: Bottom-up vs. Top-down

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