Multisensory Perception

Multisensory perception studies how people infer the state of the world from signals that are useful but imperfect. Vision, touch, audition, and proprioception each carry partial information, and the brain must decide when signals belong together, how reliable they are, and how they should influence perception and action.

The work spans cue integration, visual-haptic perception, body ownership, spatial perception, depth, material appearance, object shape, and crossmodal timing. It treats perception as a process of interpretation under uncertainty: sensory signals are noisy, sometimes ambiguous, and often affected by movement, context, prior experience, and recent adaptation.

This topic connects basic perceptual science with technology design. Understanding how multisensory signals are combined helps explain why delayed visual feedback can change perceived stiffness, why a virtual hand can feel more or less like one’s own, why synchrony matters for integration, and how XR and haptic systems can be made more intelligible by respecting perceptual constraints.