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Causal Inference in Multisensory Perception

Perceptual events derive their significance to an animal from their meaning about the world, that is from the information they carry about their causes. The brain should thus be able to efficiently infer the causes underlying our sensory events. Here we use multisensory cue combination to study caus...

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Autores principales: Körding, Konrad P., Beierholm, Ulrik, Ma, Wei Ji, Quartz, Steven, Tenenbaum, Joshua B., Shams, Ladan
Formato: Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2007
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1978520/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17895984
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0000943
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author Körding, Konrad P.
Beierholm, Ulrik
Ma, Wei Ji
Quartz, Steven
Tenenbaum, Joshua B.
Shams, Ladan
author_facet Körding, Konrad P.
Beierholm, Ulrik
Ma, Wei Ji
Quartz, Steven
Tenenbaum, Joshua B.
Shams, Ladan
author_sort Körding, Konrad P.
collection PubMed
description Perceptual events derive their significance to an animal from their meaning about the world, that is from the information they carry about their causes. The brain should thus be able to efficiently infer the causes underlying our sensory events. Here we use multisensory cue combination to study causal inference in perception. We formulate an ideal-observer model that infers whether two sensory cues originate from the same location and that also estimates their location(s). This model accurately predicts the nonlinear integration of cues by human subjects in two auditory-visual localization tasks. The results show that indeed humans can efficiently infer the causal structure as well as the location of causes. By combining insights from the study of causal inference with the ideal-observer approach to sensory cue combination, we show that the capacity to infer causal structure is not limited to conscious, high-level cognition; it is also performed continually and effortlessly in perception.
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spelling pubmed-19785202007-09-26 Causal Inference in Multisensory Perception Körding, Konrad P. Beierholm, Ulrik Ma, Wei Ji Quartz, Steven Tenenbaum, Joshua B. Shams, Ladan PLoS One Research Article Perceptual events derive their significance to an animal from their meaning about the world, that is from the information they carry about their causes. The brain should thus be able to efficiently infer the causes underlying our sensory events. Here we use multisensory cue combination to study causal inference in perception. We formulate an ideal-observer model that infers whether two sensory cues originate from the same location and that also estimates their location(s). This model accurately predicts the nonlinear integration of cues by human subjects in two auditory-visual localization tasks. The results show that indeed humans can efficiently infer the causal structure as well as the location of causes. By combining insights from the study of causal inference with the ideal-observer approach to sensory cue combination, we show that the capacity to infer causal structure is not limited to conscious, high-level cognition; it is also performed continually and effortlessly in perception. Public Library of Science 2007-09-26 /pmc/articles/PMC1978520/ /pubmed/17895984 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0000943 Text en Körding et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Körding, Konrad P.
Beierholm, Ulrik
Ma, Wei Ji
Quartz, Steven
Tenenbaum, Joshua B.
Shams, Ladan
Causal Inference in Multisensory Perception
title Causal Inference in Multisensory Perception
title_full Causal Inference in Multisensory Perception
title_fullStr Causal Inference in Multisensory Perception
title_full_unstemmed Causal Inference in Multisensory Perception
title_short Causal Inference in Multisensory Perception
title_sort causal inference in multisensory perception
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1978520/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17895984
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0000943
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