Temporal aspects of cue combination.

The human brain processes different kinds of information (or cues) independently with different neural latencies. How does the brain deal with these differences in neural latency when it combines cues into one estimate? To find out, we introduced artificial asynchronies between the moments that monocular and binocular cues indicated that the slant of a surface had suddenly changed. Subjects had to detect changes in slant or to indicate their direction. We found that the cues were combined to improve performance even when the artificial asynchrony between them was about 100 ms. We conclude that neural latency differences of tens of milliseconds between cues are irrelevant because of the low temporal resolution of neural processing.