Evidence map›Paper›PMID 31082680›Full record

ArticleCortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior2019

Integration of audiovisual spatial signals is not consistent with maximum likelihood estimation.

David Meijer, Sebastijan Veselič, Carmelo Calafiore, Uta Noppeney

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
36citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

36 citing papers in PubMed.

  1. Late Cross-Modal Biases in Neural Spatial Representations Revealed by EEG Decoding.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026
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  7. Integration of audiovisual speech perception: From infancy to older adults.The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 2025
    Article
  8. Article
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  13. Review
  14. Multisensory causal inference is feature-specific, not object-based.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023
    Article
  15. Multisensory integration in the mammalian brain: diversity and flexibility in health and disease.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023
    Review
  16. Metacognition in the audiovisual McGurk illusion: perceptual and causal confidence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023
    Article
  17. Review
  18. Visuo-tactile heading perception.Journal of neurophysiology · 2022
    Article
  19. Article
  20. Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

4 authors.

David MeijerComputational Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory, Computational Neuroscience and Cognitive Robotics Centre, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK. Electronic address: deefje.meijer@gmail.com.
Sebastijan VeseličComputational Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory, Computational Neuroscience and Cognitive Robotics Centre, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK.
Carmelo CalafioreComputational Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory, Computational Neuroscience and Cognitive Robotics Centre, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK.
Uta NoppeneyComputational Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory, Computational Neuroscience and Cognitive Robotics Centre, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Multisensory perception is regarded as one of the most prominent examples where human behaviour conforms to the computational principles of maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). In particular, observers are thought to integrate auditory and visual spatial cues weighted in proportion to their relative sensory reliabilities into the most reliable and unbiased percept consistent with MLE. Yet, evidence to date has been inconsistent. The current pre-registered, large-scale (N = 36) replication study investigated the extent to which human behaviour for audiovisual localization is in line with maximum likelihood estimation. The acquired psychophysics data show that while observers were able to reduce their multisensory variance relative to the unisensory variances in accordance with MLE, they weighed the visual signals significantly stronger than predicted by MLE. Simulations show that this dissociation can be explained by a greater sensitivity of standard estimation procedures to detect deviations from MLE predictions for sensory weights than for audiovisual variances. Our results therefore suggest that observers did not integrate audiovisual spatial signals weighted exactly in proportion to their relative reliabilities for localization. These small deviations from the predictions of maximum likelihood estimation may be explained by observers' uncertainty about the world's causal structure as accounted for by Bayesian causal inference.

Indexed as

CuesLikelihood FunctionsAcoustic StimulationAuditory PerceptionBayes TheoremFemaleHumansMalePhotic StimulationVisual PerceptionMaximum likelihood estimationMultisensory integrationMultisensory perceptionOptimalitySpatial ventriloquism

Identifiers

PMID31082680
PMCPMC6864592

What OpenQuestion holds

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LicenceCC BY
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

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.