Multisensory feature integration

Abstract

Abstract Several theoretical accounts have been put forward to help explain feature integration, including Treisman’s Feature Integration Theory and Bayesian causal inference. However, there may be some important differences between multisensory feature integration (MFI) in the spatial and chemical senses. While several of the same factors undoubtedly do appear to modulate MFI, regardless of the combination of senses under consideration (such as attention and crossmodal correspondences, or congruency), there are also a number of salient differences; these include the phenomenon of oral referral in the chemical senses, and the fact that olfactory stimuli tend to take on the sensory properties of the tastes with which they happen to be regularly paired. As such, it may not be possible to account for all cases of MFI within a single theoretical framework.