Perceptual Integration

The process by which the brain combines information arriving through different sensory channels — vision, hearing, touch, proprioception — into a single coherent percept of an object or event. Perceptual integration depends on temporal synchrony (cues arriving within roughly 100 ms of one another) and semantic congruence (cues describing the same property or event). For multimodal accessibility, especially non-visual interfaces for STEM content, designing for perceptual integration — rather than simply stacking audio, tactile, and haptic channels — is what separates systems that reduce cognitive load from systems that merely add parallel information streams the user must manually fuse.