Constructing perceptual objects: binding within and across the senses

Sensory information is processed in a distributed way, not just across the senses but also within the same sense (e.g. vision). Yet our conscious experience seems to present itself as of unified perceptual objects: Our perception seems to be of red apples, singing birds or our own bodies, not of scattered colours, shapes, sounds, and tactile sensations. How this unification is achieved, and what makes binding accurate, has been a long standing problem for cognitive neuroscientists and philosophers alike. How are attention and consciousness involved in this binding, and how should we think of cases of mis-binding? Leaving these 'how' questions aside, several voices have started to suggest that the so-called 'binding problem' has been mis-articulated or misleading. Others have pointed at crucial differences between unisensory cases and multisensory cases. The present conference is meant to shed a new light on these latest debates.