This proposal requests support for a meeting entitled, """"""""Multisensory Interactions Subserving Orienting Behavior,"""""""" a satellite to the twelfth Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neural Control of Movement. The meeting will be held April 14-16, 2002, at the Naples Beach Hotel in Naples, Florida. There has never been a meeting on multisensory behavior flanking the NCM meeting. The meeting will allow participants to easily participate in both the satellite and the main NCM meeting, as the last day of the symposium ends Tuesday evening, in tandem with the registration and reception for the main NCM meeting. The satellite centers on how inputs from different sensory modalities (visual, auditory, vestibular, & somatosensory) are combined at different stages in the CNS of different animal species to guide purposeful spatial behavior. It will provide a unique opportunity to bring together top researchers in the field. Dedicated meetings on multisensory orienting behavior have been rare. A notable exception was the satellite to the IBRO World Conference on Neuroscience (Niigata, Japan, 1995) many years ago. More recently, the International Multisensory Research Forum has organized two meetings (Oxford, UK, 1999, and Tarrytown, NY, 2000) which emphasized largely perception rather than spatial behavior. Our symposium will begin with a keynote lecture by Barry Stein. His seminal work on the neurophysiological and developmental aspects of multisensory integration in the cat superior colliculus, and in several of its cortical input areas, touches the very heart of the problems addressed in this satellite. The meeting will then progress over 2 days, organized as three symposium sessions per day. The first day deals with subcortical and cortical mechanisms underlying multisensory orienting, as well as multisensory 'exotica.' The second day covers developmental and plasticity phenomena, clinical aspects, and multisensory-evoked behavior. A dedicated Poster and Demonstration session on Computational Models will be held on the second day. In addition, two general poster sessions are planned at the end of the two afternoon breaks, though posters will be on display during the entire meeting to allow ample access. Symposium sessions will typically be 2 1/2 hours long, during which four speakers will have a half-hour (including 5-10 mins. discussion), leaving ample time for a general discussion between the audience and the session participants. Session leaders are all acknowledged leaders in their respective disciplines. They will govern the content of their sessions and select the subtopics and contributors in conjunction with the organizers. Students and post-doctoral fellows are specifically encouraged to attend and participate, and a scholarship program will target and enhance this important aspect of the meeting.
