The brain can develop conflicting multisensory principles to guide behavior.

Midbrain multisensory neurons undergo a significant postnatal transition in how they process cross-modal (e.g. visual-auditory) signals.

Predictability alters multisensory responses by modulating unisensory inputs.

The multisensory (deep) layers of the superior colliculus (SC) play an important role in detecting, localizing, and guiding orientation responses to salient events in the environment. Essential to this role is the ability of SC neurons to enhance their responses to events detected by more than one sensory modality and to become desensitized ('attenuated' or 'habituated') or sensitized ('potentiated') to events that are predictable modulatory dynamics. To identify the nature of these modulatory dynamics, we examined how the repetition of different sensory stimuli affected the unisensory and multisensory responses of neurons in the cat SC.

Noise-rearing precludes the behavioral benefits of multisensory integration.

Concordant visual-auditory stimuli enhance the responses of individual superior colliculus (SC) neurons. This neuronal capacity for "multisensory integration" is not innate: it is acquired only after substantial cross-modal (e.g.

Multisensory enhancement of overt behavior requires multisensory experience.

The superior colliculus (SC) is richly endowed with neurons that integrate cues from different senses to enhance their physiological responses and the overt behaviors they mediate. However, in the absence of experience with cross-modal combinations (e.g.

Mechanical properties of normal versus cancerous breast cells.

A cell's mechanical properties are important in determining its adhesion, migration, and response to the mechanical properties of its microenvironment and may help explain behavioral differences between normal and cancerous cells. Using fluorescently labeled peroxisomes as microrheological probes, the interior mechanical properties of normal breast cells were compared to a metastatic breast cell line, MDA-MB-231. To estimate the mechanical properties of cell cytoplasms from the motions of their peroxisomes, it was necessary to reduce the contribution of active cytoskeletal motions to peroxisome motion.