Fig. 6: Illustration of multimodal cue integration under two scenarios.
From: A systematic review and meta-analysis of unimodal and multimodal predation risk assessment in birds
For example, (A) an acoustic cue provides a lower mean estimate of risk and higher uncertainty/variance (blue dotted line) compared with a visual cue (red dashed line). The estimated risk that integrates both these sources of information using maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) integration will have lower variance than either alone, and the mean will be closer to the mean of the higher certainty unimodal cue (solid black line). B An acoustic cue (blue dotted line) and a visual cue (red dashed line) provide similar means and variances in estimated risk. Under multimodal cue integration using MLE integration (solid black line), the mean estimated risk remains unchanged but has lower variance relative to both unimodal cues.
