Early, but not late visual distractors affect movement synchronization to a temporal-spatial visual cue

Abstract

The ease of synchronizing movements to a rhythmic cue is dependent on the modality of the cue presentation: timing accuracy is much higher when synchronizing with discrete auditory rhythms than an equivalent visual stimulus presented through flashes. However, timing accuracy is improved if the visual cue presents spatial as well as temporal information (e.g., a dot following an oscillatory trajectory). Similarly, when synchronizing with an auditory target metronome in the presence of a second visual distracting metronome, the distraction is stronger when the visual cue contains spatial-temporal information rather than temporal only. The present study investigates individuals’ ability to synchronize movements to a temporal-spatial visual cue in the presence of same-modality temporal-spatial distractors. Moreover, we investigated how increasing the number of distractor stimuli impacted on maintaining synchrony with the target cue. Participants made oscillatory vertical arm movements in time with a vertically oscillating white target dot centered on a large projection screen. The target dot was surrounded by 2, 8, or 14 distractor dots, which had an identical trajectory to the target but at a phase lead or lag of 0, 100, or 200 ms. We found participants’ timing performance was only affected in the phase-lead conditions and when there were large numbers of distractors present (8 and 14). This asymmetry suggests participants still rely on salient events in the stimulus trajectory to synchronize movements. Subsequently, distractions occurring in the window of attention surrounding those events have the maximum impact on timing performance.

Sensorimotor Synchronization with Different Metrical Levels of Point-Light Dance Movements

“…Specifically, visual beat in a periodic biological motion may be communicated by both the position and the velocity parameters, such as the recurrent lowest position or the recurrent peak velocity of the bounce (Su, 2014a ). Although several studies support the role of velocity cues (Luck and Sloboda, 2009 ; Wöllner et al, 2012 ; Su, 2014a ), the position information might still influence where the beat was perceived (Su, 2014a ; Booth and Elliott, 2015 ). As such, two sets of stimulus beat onset times were extracted, one based on the peak vertical velocity (termed “velocity beat”) and the other based on the vertical end position (termed “position beat”) of the bounce, with the former preceding the latter in every bounce (Figure 2C ).…”

Multimodal sensory integration: Diminishing returns in rhythmic synchronization.

“…In the previous study, no visual feedback was presented during auditory only. Therefore, we speculate it could be that the spatial-temporal visual feedback might have been a distractor and, therefore, affected the synchronization performance (Booth & Elliott, 2015). This may also explain why audio-tactile stimuli did not improve performance beyond its unimodal constituents.…”