Peripheral and central sensation: multisensory orienting and recognition across species.

Only a fraction of sensory input is selected and recognized. In primate vision, selecting and recognizing are looking and seeing, specialities of peripheral and central vision. In primates, feedforward inputs drive seeing both foveally and peripherally; feedback processes sculpt seeing foveally. Selection and recognition are extended across multiple senses. Across animal species, selection can also involve orienting, for example, head, limb, whiskers, tentacles, snout, and/or ear, instead of gaze; central recognition can also involve, for example, microvibrissae (mice), nose (dogs, mice), lips and tongues (human infants), and/or acoustic fovea (bats). Species with larger prefrontal cortices should have better endogenous control over orienting and feedback for recognition; these feedback controls facilitate decision-making for survival, learning, and creativity. Attentional bottlenecks force animals to deeply process only a selected fraction of sensory inputs. This motivates a unifying central-peripheral dichotomy (CPD), which separates multisensory processing into functionally defined central and peripheral senses. Peripheral senses (e.g., human audition and peripheral vision) select a fraction of the sensory inputs by orienting animals' attention; central senses (e.g., human foveal vision) allow animals to recognize the selected inputs. Originally used to understand human vision, CPD can be applied to multisensory processes across species. I first describe key characteristics of central and peripheral senses, such as the degree of top-down feedback and density of sensory receptors, and then show CPD as a framework to link ecological, behavioral, neurophysiological, and anatomical data and produce falsifiable predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]