Scientists' attempts to understand the physiology underlying our apprehension of thephysical world was long dominated by a focus on the individual senses. The 1980s saw the beginningof systematic efforts to examine interactions among different sensory modalities at the level of thesingle neuron. And by the end of the 1990s, a recognizable and multidisciplinary field of"multisensory processes" had emerged. More recently, studies involving both human andnonhuman subjects have focused on relationships among multisensory neuronal ensembles and theirbehavioral, perceptual, and cognitive correlates. The New Handbook of MultisensoryProcessing synthesizes the central themes in this rapidly developing area, reports oncurrent findings, and offers a blueprint for future research. The contributions, all of them writtenfor this volume by leading experts, reflect the evolution and current state of the field.
This handbook does more than simply review the field. Each of the volume's elevensections broadly surveys a major topic, and each begins with a substantive and thought-provokingcommentary by the section editor that identifies the major issues being explored, describes theirtreatment in the chapters that follow, and sets these findings within the context of the existingbody of knowledge. Together, the commentaries and chapters provide an invaluable guide to areas ofgeneral agreement, unresolved issues, and topics that remain to be explored in this fast-movingfield.
