Download - Berlin School of Mind and Brain

Bianca van Kemenade
Multisensory Integration
Our senses are constantly bombarded with information from the different modalities. In
order to interact with our environment in an appropriate manner, we have to select which
information is most important. In the process of integrating this information to give rise
to a conscious percept, the different modalities can influence each other: our conscious
perception of a stimulus in one modality can be influenced by a stimulus in another
modality. This process is often referred to as multisensory integration, or cross-modal
processing. Multisensory integration is a broad topic that covers a wide range of research;
therefore I will select some of the most important findings. I will introduce some
interesting illusions, discuss some studies on the neural mechanisms underlying
multisensory integration, and cover some patient studies. With this overview I would like
to introduce this fascinating topic to other scientists working in different fields.
Christian Kellner
Color Vision: From the outside world via the cortex to consciousness
Color and color vision has always been a topic that fascinated scholars, ranging from
Dalton's research of color blindness over Goethe's "Theory of Color" to the "dispute"
between the trichromatic theory of Young–Helmholtz theory and the opponent process
theory of Hering. Color (vision) also became a highly debated topic in the Philosophy of
mind with the problem of "qualia" (and its suggested consequence of the "explanatory
gap").
At the core of a lot of those problems lies the fundamental question of the relationship
between the outside (physical) world and the subjective personal experience. Of course,
nowadays neuroscientists believe that the link is made via the brain. Though (color) vision
is a field that has undergone intensive research by neuroscientists, there are of course
some yet fundamental but unsolved problems; two famous ones are the problem of
dichromats ("what do 'color blind' people see") and the problem of unique hues (the
elementary chromatic hues: red, green, yellow & blue) and their (still missing) neuronal
correlates.
I will mainly focus on the current state of the latter problem and if there is time/space left
I will also try to present some new insights about the problem of color blindness.
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