Cross-modal temporal biases emerge during early sensitive periods

Abstract

Human perception features stable biases, such as perceiving visual events as later than synchronous auditory events. The origin of such perceptual biases is unknown, they could be innate or shaped by sensory experience during a sensitive period. To investigate the role of sensory experience, we tested whether a congenital, transient loss of vision, caused by bilateral dense cataracts, has sustained effects on the ability to order events spatio-temporally within and across sensory modalities. Most strikingly, individuals with reversed congenital cataracts showed a bias towards perceiving visual stimuli as occurring earlier than auditory (Exp. 1) and tactile (Exp.2) stimuli. In contrast, both normally sighted controls and individuals who could see at birth but developed cataracts during childhood reported the typical bias of perceiving vision as delayed compared to audition. Thus, we provide strong evidence that cross-modal temporal perceptual biases depend on sensory experience and emerge during an early sensitive period.

Calibrating vision: Concepts and questions

“…Related deficits have also been found in a case of visual recovery of blindness from corneal scarring (Fine et al, 2003). Deficits in individuals treated for congenital cataracts have also been documented for multisensory and crossmodal processing, for example, reduced multisensory facilitation in speech perception (Putzar, Goerendt, et al, 2007); impaired audio-visual simultaneity perception (Chen et al, 2017); reduced audiovisual and audiohaptic sound-shape associations (Sourav et al, 2019), and atypical visual and auditory temporal biases (Badde et al, 2019). This catalogue of pervasive visual and multisensory perceptual deficits in individuals who experienced even a brief postnatal period of visual deprivation due to congenital cataracts attests to the importance of postnatal visual experience for normal visual development.…”

Free Sensory Experiences in Early Childhood Development

“…This space allows us to work towards the goal of guaranteeing inclusive, equitable and quality education and promoting opportunities of learning in the educational stage that concerns us. Various investigations have revealed the importance of sensory development from newborns and the way in which these experiences contribute to meeting the specific educational needs that are found in our classrooms today (Badde et al 2019;Pineda, 2020).…”