Abstract

For us to interact with our environment we must have an understanding of the location and properties of the objects within it over time. Incoming stimuli from different sensory modalities continuously provide information. In order to create a coherent percept, it is necessary to combine these sensory signals in the brain into a single representation of an object or event. Temporal integration, the process of combining information over time is one important prerequisite for it. Likewise, multisensory integration, the process of combining information from different sensory modalities to generate a coherent percept is of great importance. Furthermore, as our environment is not static but dynamic it is necessary to combine sensory information over time and space. Despite, the ever-increasing neuroscientific results, much about the underlying brain mechanisms remains unknown. This thesis describes an effort of understanding how sensory information are integrated in the brain and what effects attention has on how we integrate multiple objects in space and time. Chapter 1 introduces the reader to the existing literature on neural oscillations, specifically alpha band frequency, which is hypothesized to play a critical role in temporal processing and attention. This is followed by a review of the literature on temporal integration and the theoretical background of multisensory integration. The following chapters will report the three studies conducted: Chapter 2 describes the first study, a MEG study that investigates the role of alpha oscillations in temporal integration. Chapter 3 reports the second MEG study, which focuses the role of attention to modality in multisensory integration. Chapter 4 presents the third study, a behavioral oscillations study, which focuses on the role of neural oscillations in selective attention in a dynamic scene. Finally, Chapter 5 summarizes all the findings from this research.