ReviewFrontiers in psychology2017
Assessing the Role of the 'Unity Assumption' on Multisensory Integration: A Review.
Review in Frontiers in psychology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 74 papers.
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Who cites it
74 citing papers in PubMed.
- Perception of temporal synchrony not a prerequisite for multisensory integration.Scientific reports · 2024Trial
- Music and body motion contribute asymmetrically to emotion perception in traditional Chinese plucked-instrument performance.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The Somatic Rubber Hand Illusion does not modulate perceived hand position in children with severe visual impairments.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Visual and tactile motion cues enhance the categorisation of novel object shapes.Experimental brain research · 2026Article
- Not proportional after all: Investigating speed perception with the beep-speed illusion.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Article
- From balance to perception: vestibular-cognitive integration predicts signal discrimination in a Multirule Visual Monitoring Task.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Article
- Sounds easy, looks nice: Crossmodal transfer of auditory processing fluency to visual object preference.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
- Prior expectations guide multisensory integration during face-to-face communication.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Four Trials Is Not Enough: The Amount of Prior Audio-Visual Exposure Determines the Strength of Audio-Tactile Crossmodal Correspondence Early in Development.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Perceiving temporal structure within and between the senses: A multisensory/crossmodal perspective.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Review
- Amputees but not healthy subjects optimally integrate non-spatially matched visuo-tactile stimuli.iScience · 2025Article
- Contextual consistency promotes visual-haptic simultaneity perception.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2025Article
- Examining auditory modulations on detecting and pooling visual global motion.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Article
- Synergy Makes Direct Perception Inefficient.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Exploring virtual reality object perception following sensory-motor interactions with different visuo-haptic collider properties.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Involvement of the superior colliculi in crossmodal correspondences.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2024Article
- Evaluating the Bayesian causal inference model of intentional binding through computational modeling.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Semantic congruency modulates the speed-up of multisensory responses.Scientific reports · 2024Article
14 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
There has been longstanding interest from both experimental psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists in the potential modulatory role of various top-down factors on multisensory integration/perception in humans. One such top-down influence, often referred to in the literature as the 'unity assumption,' is thought to occur in those situations in which an observer considers that various of the unisensory stimuli that they have been presented with belong to one and the same object or event (Welch and Warren, 1980). Here, we review the possible factors that may lead to the emergence of the unity assumption. We then critically evaluate the evidence concerning the consequences of the unity assumption from studies of the spatial and temporal ventriloquism effects, from the McGurk effect, and from the Colavita visual dominance paradigm. The research that has been published to date using these tasks provides support for the claim that the unity assumption influences multisensory perception under at least a subset of experimental conditions. We then consider whether the notion has been superseded in recent years by the introduction of priors in Bayesian causal inference models of human multisensory perception. We suggest that the prior of common cause (that is, the prior concerning whether multisensory signals originate from the same source or not) offers the most useful way to quantify the unity assumption as a continuous cognitive variable.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.