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Studies on multisensory perception often focus on simplistic conditions in which one single stimulus is presented per modality. Yet, in everyday life, we usually encounter multiple signals per modality. To understand how multiple signals within and across the senses are combined, we extended the classical audio‐visual spatial ventriloquism paradigm to combine two visual stimuli with one sound. The individual visual stimuli presented in the same trial differed in their relative timing and spatial offsets to the sound, allowing us to contrast their individual and combined influence on sound localization judgements. We find that the ventriloquism bias is not dominated by a single visual stimulus but rather is shaped by the collective multisensory evidence. In particular, the contribution of an individual visual stimulus to the ventriloquism bias depends not only on its own relative spatio‐temporal alignment to the sound but also the spatio‐temporal alignment of the other visual stimulus. We propose that this pattern of multi‐stimulus multisensory integration reflects the evolution of evidence for sensory causal relations during individual trials, calling for the need to extend established models of multisensory causal inference to more naturalistic conditions. Our data also suggest that this pattern of multisensory interactions extends to the ventriloquism aftereffect, a bias in sound localization observed in unisensory judgements following a multisensory stimulus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The brain engages the processes of multisensory integration and recalibration to deal with discrepant multisensory signals. These processes consider the reliability of each sensory input, with the more reliable modality receiving the stronger weight. Sensory reliability is typically assessed via the variability of participants' judgments, yet these can be shaped by factors both external and internal to the nervous system. For example, motor noise and participant's dexterity with the specific response method contribute to judgment variability, and different response methods applied to the same stimuli can result in different estimates of sensory reliabilities. Here we ask how such variations in reliability induced by variations in the response method affect multisensory integration and sensory recalibration, as well as motor adaptation, in a visuomotor paradigm. Participants performed center-out hand movements and were asked to judge the position of the hand or rotated visual feedback at the movement end points. We manipulated the variability, and thus the reliability, of repeated judgments by asking participants to respond using either a visual or a proprioceptive matching procedure. We find that the relative weights of visual and proprioceptive signals, and thus the asymmetry of multisensory integration and recalibration, depend on the reliability modulated by the judgment method. Motor adaptation, in contrast, was insensitive to this manipulation. Hence, the outcome of multisensory binding is shaped by the noise introduced by sensorimotor processing, in line with perception and action being intertwined. NEW & NOTEWORTHY: Our brain tends to combine multisensory signals based on their respective reliability. This reliability depends on sensory noise in the environment, noise in the nervous system, and, as we show here, variability induced by the specific judgment procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of transforming business models and activities toward a sustainable economy is more urgent than ever and manifests in the adoption of international agreements and regulatory initiatives. Company transactions, including mergers and acquisitions (M&A), need to pay attention to sustainability concepts and their implications. Consequently, the current and traditional literature on M&A processes acknowledges the role of sustainability as a prerequisite for success in M&A operations. However, reviews of the relationship between sustainability and M&A from an integrative perspective that highlight the pre- and post-deal stages are limited. To bring further transparency to this context, we perform a systematic review of the academic literature on the relevance and implications of sustainability in M&A, focusing on archival studies. We present an overview of major sustainability influences at different stages of the M&A process, using the perspective of the acquirer as well as the target of sustainability. We observe that in all analyzed pre- and post-deal stages, sustainability is identified as having an impact or being impacted by M&A activities. Accordingly, practitioners' strategic consideration of sustainability for deal origination and performance is required. Furthermore, we highlight several understudied factors and create a research agenda, as research findings are, to some extent, heterogeneous and limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hearing is an active process, and recent studies show that even the ear is affected by cognitive states or motor actions. One example are movements of the eardrum induced by saccadic eye movements, known as "eye movement-related eardrum oscillations" (EMREOs). While these are systematically shaped by the direction and size of saccades, the consequences of saccadic eye movements and their resulting EMREOs for hearing remain unclear. We here studied their implications for the detection of near-threshold clicks in human participants. Across three experiments, sound detection was not affected by their time of presentation relative to saccade onset, by saccade amplitude or direction. While the EMREOs were shaped by the direction and amplitude of the saccadic movement, inducing covert shifts in spatial attention did not affect the EMREO, suggesting that this signature of active sensing is restricted to overt changes in visual focus. Importantly, in our experiments, fluctuations in the EMREO amplitude were not related to detection performance, at least when monaural cues are sufficient. Hence, while eye movements may shape the transduction of acoustic information, the behavioral implications remain to be understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perceptual coherence in the face of discrepant multisensory signals is achieved via the processes of multisensory integration, recalibration and sometimes motor adaptation. These supposedly operate on different time scales, with integration reducing immediate sensory discrepancies and recalibration and motor adaptation reflecting the cumulative influence of their recent history. Importantly, whether discrepant signals are bound during perception is guided by the brains' inference of whether they originate from a common cause. When combined, these two notions lead to the hypothesis that the time scales on which integration and recalibration (or motor adaptation) operate are associated with different time scales of evidence about a common cause underlying two signals. We tested this prediction in a well‐established visuo‐motor paradigm, in which human participants performed visually guided hand movements. The kinematic correlation between hand and cursor movements indicates their common origin, which allowed us to manipulate the common‐cause evidence by titrating this correlation. Specifically, we dissociated hand and cursor signals during individual movements while preserving their correlation across the series of movement endpoints. Following our hypothesis, this manipulation reduced integration compared with a condition in which visual and proprioceptive signals were perfectly correlated. In contrast, recalibration and motor adaption were not affected by this manipulation. This supports the notion that multisensory integration and recalibration deal with sensory discrepancies on different time scales guided by common‐cause evidence: Integration is prompted by local common‐cause evidence and reduces immediate discrepancies, whereas recalibration and motor adaptation are prompted by global common‐cause evidence and reduce persistent discrepancies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multisensory integration and recalibration are two processes by which perception deals with discrepant signals. Both are often studied in the spatial ventriloquism paradigm. There, integration is probed by the presentation of discrepant audio-visual stimuli, while recalibration manifests as an aftereffect in subsequent judgements of unisensory sounds. Both biases are typically quantified against the degree of audio-visual discrepancy, reflecting the possibility that both may arise from common underlying multisensory principles. We tested a specific prediction of this: that both processes should also scale similarly with the history of multisensory discrepancies, i.e. the sequence of discrepancies in several preceding audio-visual trials. Analyzing data from ten experiments with randomly varying spatial discrepancies we confirmed the expected dependency of each bias on the immediately presented discrepancy. And in line with the aftereffect being a cumulative process, this scaled with the discrepancies presented in at least three preceding audio-visual trials. However, the ventriloquism bias did not depend on this three-trial history of multisensory discrepancies and also did not depend on the aftereffect biases in previous trials ‐ making these two multisensory processes experimentally dissociable. These findings support the notion that the ventriloquism bias and the aftereffect reflect distinct functions, with integration maintaining a stable percept by reducing immediate sensory discrepancies and recalibration maintaining an accurate percept by accounting for consistent discrepancies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A continuous flow microwave system based on a transmission line short-circuited waveguide reactor concept is described. The continuous flow reactor is capable of operating in a genuine high-temperature/high-pressure process window (310°C/60 bar), applying a microwave transparent and chemical resistant cylindrical γ-Al2O3 tube as reaction zone. The system can be operated in an extremely energy efficient manner, utilizing 0.6–6 kW microwave power (2.45 GHz). The application of the reactor for processing four chemical transformations in a high-temperature/high-pressure regime with a throughout of 3.5–6.0 l/h is demonstrated.

Information about the position of our hand is provided by multisensory signals that are often not perfectly aligned. Discrepancies between the seen and felt hand position or its movement trajectory engage the processes of 1) multisensory integration, 2) sensory recalibration, and 3) motor adaptation, which adjust perception and behavioral responses to apparently discrepant signals. To foster our understanding of the coemergence of these three processes, we probed their short-term dependence on multisensory discrepancies in a visuomotor task that has served as a model for multisensory perception and motor control previously. We found that the well-established integration of discrepant visual and proprioceptive signals is tied to the immediate discrepancy and independent of the outcome of the integration of discrepant signals in immediately preceding trials. However, the strength of integration was context dependent, being stronger in an experiment featuring stimuli that covered a smaller range of visuomotor discrepancies (±15°) compared with one covering a larger range (±30°). Both sensory recalibration and motor adaptation for nonrepeated movement directions were absent after two bimodal trials with same or opposite visuomotor discrepancies. Hence our results suggest that short-term sensory recalibration and motor adaptation are not an obligatory consequence of the integration of preceding discrepant multisensory signals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tins.2009.12.001 Byline: Stefano Panzeri (1), Nicolas Brunel (2)(3), Nikos K. Logothetis (4)(5), Christoph Kayser (4) Abstract: Determining how neuronal activity represents sensory information is central for understanding perception. Recent work shows that neural responses at different timescales can encode different stimulus attributes, resulting in a temporal multiplexing of sensory information. Multiplexing increases the encoding capacity of neural responses, enables disambiguation of stimuli that cannot be discriminated at a single response timescale, and makes sensory representations stable to the presence of variability in the sensory world. Thus, as we discuss here, temporal multiplexing could be a key strategy used by the brain to form an information-rich and stable representation of the environment. Author Affiliation: (1) Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department, Italian Institute of Technology, Via Morego 30, 16163 Genova, Italy (2) Laboratory of Neurophysics and Physiology, Universite Paris Descartes, Paris, France (3) CNRS UMR 8119, Paris, France (4) Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Spemannstrasse 38, 72076 Tubingen, Germany (5) Division of Imaging Science and Biomedical Engineering, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PT, UK

Previous studies have reported correlates of bodily self-illusions such as the rubber hand in signatures of rhythmic brain activity. However, individual studies focused on specific variations of the rubber hand paradigm, used different experimental setups to induce this, or used different control conditions to isolate the neurophysiological signatures related to the illusory state, leaving the specificity of the reported illusion-signatures unclear. We here quantified correlates of the rubber hand illusion in EEG-derived oscillatory brain activity and asked two questions: which of the observed correlates are robust to the precise nature of the control conditions used as contrast for the illusory state, and whether such correlates emerge directly around the subjective illusion onset. To address these questions, we relied on two experimental configurations to induce the illusion, on different non-illusion conditions to isolate neurophysiological signatures of the illusory state, and we implemented an analysis directly focusing on the immediate moment of the illusion onset. Our results reveal a widespread suppression of alpha and beta-band activity associated with the illusory state in general, whereby the reduction of beta power prevailed around the immediate illusion onset. These results confirm previous reports of a suppression of alpha and beta rhythms during body illusions, but also highlight the difficulties to directly pinpoint the precise neurophysiological correlates of the illusory state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Due to the changes in the indication range for cochlear implants and the demographic development towards an aging society, more and more people are in receipt of cochlear implants. An implantation requires a close-meshed audiological and logopedic aftercare. Hearing therapy rehabilitation currently requires great personnel effort and is time consuming. Hearing and speech therapy rehabilitation can be supported by digital hearing training programs. However, the apps currently on the market are to a limited degree personalized and structured. Increasing digitalization makes it possible, especially in times of pandemics, to decouple hearing therapy treatment from everyday clinical practice. Material and Methods: For this purpose, an app is in development that provides hearing therapy tailored to the patient. The individual factors that influence hearing outcome are considered. Using intelligent algorithms, the app determines the selection of exercises, the level of difficulty and the speed at which the difficulty is increased. Results: The app works autonomously without being connected to local speech therapists. In addition, the app is able to analyze patient difficulties within the exercises and provides conclusions about the need for technical adjustments. Conclusions: The presented newly developed app represents a possibility to support, replace, expand and improve the classic outpatient hearing and speech therapy after CI implantation. The way the application works allows it to reach more people and provide a time- and cost-saving alternative to traditional therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]