ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes the cognitive neuroscience evidence concerning the spatial rule in healthy adult human observers. It examines the dual stream model, arguing that the distinction between “what” vs “where” processing pathways in unisensory and multisensory perception can help to account for the seemingly discrepant behavioural data. The chapter looks at the data concerning the emergence of the spatial rule in early development. Many authors have claimed that spatial co-location facilitates multisensory integration in humans. Elsewhere, spatial co-location has repeatedly been shown to hinder people’s ability to correctly make crossmodal temporal order judgments. The spatial rule of multisensory integration—namely, that spatial coincidence facilitates the binding of cues from different sensory modalities—mostly seems to hold only when the observer’s task is in some sense spatial. The chapter argues that the published evidence clearly demonstrates that the spatial rule operates in human perception/performance only under a subset of experimental conditions.
