First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This volume on intersensory perception and sensory integration is the second volume of the series, Perception and Perceptual Development: A Critical Review Series. The topic of the volume is timely, for in recent years, many investigators have noted that information about any natural event is obtained by a perceiver from a variety of sources. Such an observation immediately leads to the question of how this information is synthesized and organized. Of course, the implication that there are several discrete input channels that must be processed has come under immediate attack by researchers such as the Gibsons. They find it extremely artificial to regard natural information as being cut up and requiring cementing. Nevertheless, the possibility that during ontogene sis, perception involves the integration of separate information has attracted the attention of scholars concerned with both normal and abnormal development. In the case of normal development, a lively controversy has arisen between those who believe perceptual develop ment goes from integration toward differentiation and those who hold the opposite view. In the case of abnormal psychological development such as learning disabilities, many workers have suggested that percep tual integration is at fault. In thinking about the issues raised in this volume, we are particularly indebted to our former teachers and colleagues: Eleanor and James Gibson, T. A. Ryan, Robert B. MacLeod, and Jerome Bruner. We are pleased to acknowledge the secretarial help of Karen Weeks in the preparation of this volume.

Lifespan human development is the study of all aspects of biological, physical, cognitive, socioemotional, and contextual development from conception to the end of life. In approximately 800 signed articles by experts from a wide diversity of fields, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Lifespan Human Development explores all individual and situational factors related to human development across the lifespan. Some of the broad thematic areas will include: Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood Aging Behavioral and Developmental Disorders Cognitive Development Community and Culture Early and Middle Childhood Education through the Lifespan Genetics and Biology Gender and Sexuality Life Events Mental Health through the Lifespan Research Methods in Lifespan Development Speech and Language Across the Lifespan Theories and Models of Development. This five-volume encyclopedia promises to be an authoritative, discipline-defining work for students and researchers seeking to become familiar with various approaches, theories, and empirical findings about human development broadly construed, as well as past and current research.

It has become accepted in the neuroscience community that perception and performance are quintessentially multisensory by nature. Using the full palette of modern brain imaging and neuroscience methods, The Neural Bases of Multisensory Processes details current understanding in the neural bases for these phenomena as studied across species, stages of development, and clinical statuses. Organized thematically into nine sub-sections, the book is a collection of contributions by leading scientists in the field. Chapters build generally from basic to applied, allowing readers to ascertain how fundamental science informs the clinical and applied sciences. Topics discussed include: Anatomy, essential for understanding the neural substrates of multisensory processing Neurophysiological bases and how multisensory stimuli can dramatically change the encoding processes for sensory information Combinatorial principles and modeling, focusing on efforts to gain a better mechanistic handle on multisensory operations and their network dynamics Development and plasticity Clinical manifestations and how perception and action are affected by altered sensory experience Attention and spatial representations The last sections of the book focus on naturalistic multisensory processes in three separate contexts: motion signals, multisensory contributions to the perception and generation of communication signals, and how the perception of flavor is generated. The text provides a solid introduction for newcomers and a strong overview of the current state of the field for experts.

We perceive and understand our environment using many sensory systems-vision, touch, hearing, taste, smell, and proprioception. These multiple sensory modalities give us complementary sources of information about the environment. This book explores how we develop the ability to integrate our senses.

Research is suggesting that rather than our senses being independent, perception is fundamentally a multisensory experience. This handbook reviews the evidence and explores the theory of broad underlying principles that govern sensory interactions, regardless of the specific senses involved.

Simple reaction time to stimuli from different sensory modalities presented simultaneously typically is shorter than reaction time to a single stimulus. In this study, auditory, visual, and tactile stimuli were presented in different combinations and at varying stimulus onset asynchronies. Two different types of models for the observed reaction time facilitation effects are developed and tested. Separate activation (race) type models assume that stimulus information in different sensory channels is processed in parallel and independently while coactivation type models allow interactions across different channels. Using Boole's inequality as a test for separate activation models it could be shown that these models cannot predict as much facilitation as observed. A superposition and a diffusion model of coactivation provided a promising quantitative approximation to the data.