# Is Consciousness Multisensory? Charles Spence and Tim Bayne **Opening (not a real abstract):** Crossmodal interaction: This term is used to refer to situations in which the presentation of a stimulus in one sensory modality influences the perception/performance of an individual responding to a stimulus presented in a different modality. (Note that we use the term modality as shorthand for sensory modality in the rest of this chapter.) Examples of multisensory integration (later in the chapter) can, then, be thought of as a subset of all crossmodal interactions. One example that may help to highlight this distinction concerns what happens when an alerting sound is presented that makes a person respond to a visual target more rapidly. This effect is crossmodal in the sense that the input from one modality (audition) affects an organism’s responsiveness to a stimulus presented in a different modality (vision), but does not necessarily give rise to the integration of the **Authors:** [[Is Consciousness Multisensory?]]