Moving Multisensory Research Along: Motion Perception Across Sensory Modalities

The past few years have seen a rapid growth of interest regarding how information from the different senses is combined. Historically, the majority of the research on this topic has focused on interactions in the perception of stationary stimuli, but given that the majority of stimuli in the world move, an important question concerns the extent to which principles derived from stationary stimuli also apply to moving stimuli. A key finding emerging from recent work with moving stimuli is that our perception of stimulus movement in one modality is frequently, and unavoidably, modulated by the concurrent movement of stimuli in other sensory modalities. Visual motion has a particularly strong influence on the perception of auditory and tactile motion. These behavioral results are now being complemented by the results of neuroimaging studies that have pointed out the existence of both modality-specific motion-processing areas and areas involved in processing motion in more than one sense. The challenge for the future will be to develop novel experimental paradigms that can integrate behavioral and neuroscientific approaches in order to refine our understanding of multisensory contributions to the perception of movement.