FAU own research funding: EFI / IZKF / EAM ...
Acronym: ETI
Start date : 01.01.2022
End date : 31.12.2022
In their everyday environment, humans are
bombarded with numerous sensory signals in distinct sensory modalities. Yet, humans
do not perceive these signals as independent perceptual fragments, but our
brain effortlessly relates and binds percepts across the sensory channels to
create a multisensory perception of the environment (e.g., binding the different voices and faces on a busy party). To build a veridical multisensory representation
in such a scenario, our brain faces two interrelated challenges (among others):
First, the causal inference problem: the brain should only bind multisensory
signals if they arose from a common cause to avoid misattributing information
to the wrong source (e.g., a voice to the wrong speaker). Second, the attentional selection problem: Our
environment provides a multitude of multisensory signals at any time, but we
cannot consciously perceive all at once so that the multisensory stimuli
compete for our limited attentional resources. To understand how the brain jointly solves the two problems, the proposed research projects aims at characterizing
how attentional processes interact with multisensory causal inferences at the
perceptual and neural level by combining psychophysical and neurophysiological EEG
methods with computational modelling.