Viewpoint on Multisensory Decision-Making

Abstract

This viewpoint interview features Adele Diederich, Thomas Otto and Cesare Parise discussing multisensory decision-making from the perspectives of mathematical psychology, psychophysics, and computational modelling. They reflect on both current theories and their personal paths into the field, including key influences and scientific traditions that shaped their thinking. The conversation revisits major developments in multisensory research, from early work on intersensory facilitation and redundant-signals paradigms to later advances in race models, diffusion models, Bayesian approaches, and more recent stimulus-computable mechanistic accounts. The authors highlight how these frameworks have shaped the field, ongoing controversies, and emerging trends. A shared theme is the need for conceptual clarity, rigorous methods, and integration across behavioural, neural and computational levels, alongside support for open-science practices. At the same time, differences remain in the emphasis placed on various modelling approaches, for example, in the relative weight given to race models, dynamic decision models, optimal frameworks, and mechanistic accounts of multisensory processing. Overall, the interview presents multisensory decision-making as a dynamic and evolving field, whose future will depend on both new tools and continued critical evaluation of its theories and methods.