Robert Jacobs
Wednesday 27th April 2016
Time: 4.00pm
Ground Floor Seminar Room
25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG
From Sensation to Conception: Theoretical Perspectives on Multisensory
Perception and Cross-Modal Transfer
If a person is trained to recognize or categorize objects or events
using one sensory modality, the person can often recognize or categorize
those same (or similar) objects and events via a novel modality, an
instance of cross-modal transfer of knowledge. How is this accomplished?
The Multisensory Hypothesis states that people extract the intrinsic,
modality-independent properties of objects and events, and represent
these properties in multisensory representations. These representations
mediate the transfer of knowledge across modality-specific
representations. In this talk, I'll present two projects evaluating the
Multisensory Hypothesis using experimental and computational
methodologies. The first project examines visual-haptic transfer of
object shape knowledge, and the second project examines a novel hidden
(latent) variable model of multisensory perception. I'll also consider
implications of an experiment demonstrating generalization from
perception to motor production for our understanding of cross-modal
transfer.
+44 (0)20 7679 1176