mislocalizations

Mislocalizations are errors in determining the location of a stimulus, object, or event. The term is used across fields such as neuroscience, psychology, and robotics to describe when a location is misperceived, misreported, or misremembered. They can affect sensory perception, motor planning, or state estimation in machines.

In perception, mislocalization can stem from sensory noise, attention, and multisensory integration. Visual stimuli can bias the perceived location of sounds (the ventriloquism effect), and tactile or proprioceptive signals can be attributed to adjacent body parts. Brain injury to parietal areas can produce neglect or incorrect localization of stimuli in space.

In memory and cognition, mislocalization refers to errors in recalling where an event occurred, or attributing a memory to a wrong source or location, sometimes called source monitoring errors.

In robotics and mapping, mislocalization occurs when a system's internal estimate of its position is incorrect, leading to navigation failures. It can arise from sensor noise, odometry drift, or ambiguities in matching observations to a map.

Mislocalizations are a general concept describing incorrect spatial attribution, whether arising from perceptual processing, memory, or computational state estimation.