In the multiple modality reliability assessment portion of the study, participants completed all three questionnaire modalities in one day.
If this is the case, it could very well be due to asymmetries in the modality-specific reliability of temporal information.
On the other hand, when we added the haptic modality in the training phase, it is possible that redundant signals about spatial information on the visual stimuli, provided by both visual and haptic modalities, increased the percept reliability ("sensory integration").
We chose to use only one therapist because, with training and close monitoring, we theorized that a single experienced individual was more likely to achieve a standardized approach to each subject than several therapists in a modality where only weak reliability between practitioners in diagnosis and palpation techniques has been reported [ 25- 27].
This asymmetry in crossmodal audiovisual influences confirms previous results (Bruns & Getzmann, 2008; Chen & Yeh, 2009; but the opposite has also been shown: van Wassenhove et al., 2008) and is most likely caused either by asymmetries in involuntary crossmodal grouping or by asymmetries in modality-specific temporal reliabilities.
The almost perfect interobserver agreement (>0.80) for the grading of stress fractures by both modalities emphasizes the robustness and reliability of the chosen, simplified grading systems [ 18].
We have previously shown that, even in the case of multiple modalities and time-varying evidence reliability, humans are able to accumulate evidence across time and modalities in a statistically near-optimal fashion (Drugowitsch et al., 2014).
Conclusion: Maternal betamethasone administration can cause a significant but transient, reduction in biophysical profile scores, however the middle cerebral and umbilical artery Doppler indices were found to be unaffected suggesting the reliability of this modality for the evaluation of the fetuses previously exposed to the antenatal steroids.
Considering this observation, the reliability of a modality is defined in several ways as mentioned in [16].
Here, the reliability of each modality is calculated as follows: λ m = 1 N ∑ n = 1 N ( s n m - min ( s n m ) ) 2, (16).
