Integration of sensory information within touch and across modalities

Abstract—We perceive the world surrounding us via multiple sensory modalities, including touch, vision and audition. The information derived from all these different modalities has to converge in order to form a coherent and robust percept of the world. Here, we review a model (the MLE model) that in the statistical sense describes an optimal integration mechanism. The benefit from integrating sensory information comes from a reduction in variance of the final perceptual estimate. We here illustrate this integration mechanism in the human brain with two examples: the fist example demonstrates the integration of force and position cues to shape within haptic perception; the second example highlights multimodal perception and shows that tactile and auditory information for temporal perception interacts in a way predicted by the MLE integration model