Reflecting on The Merging of the Senses: A Cognitive Psychology Perspective

The publication of Barry Stein and Alex Meredith's The Merging of the Senses in 1993 was a hugely influential event during the development of my own research career, as an experimental psychologist, as I am sure it was for so many others. At the time, I was embarking on the study of crossmodal links in spatial attention in neurologically normal adult humans. The body of neurophysiological research summarized in Stein and Meredith's book helped to draw people's attention to the importance of spatiotemporal coincidence to spatial behaviours (such as orienting). Cognitive neuroscientists have sometimes struggled to demonstrate similar phenomena in awake humans while at the same time Bayesian accounts have come to provide a popular alternative explanation for the way in which multisensory integration operates under many conditions. A growing awareness of the importance of considering not only spatiotemporal factors but also the semantic meaning and crossmodal correspondences that help to solve the multisensory binding problem has also emerged in the literature, as has a realization of the importance of context effects. Nevertheless, for those cognitive psychologists, like myself, interested in evaluating the implications for human spatial attention and multisensory perception, the book certainly galvanized a generation of young researchers to move beyond the unisensory approach to psychology that had seemingly become entrenched in the literature.