Multisensory temporal order judgments: When two locations are better than one

Abstract

In Experiment 1, participants were presented with pairs of stimuli (one visual and the other tactile) from the left and/or right of fixation at varying stimulus onset asynchronies and were required to make unspeeded temporal order judgments (TOJs) regarding which modality was presented first. When the participants adopted an uncrossed-hands posture, just noticeable differences (JNDs) were lower (i.e., multisensory TOJs were more precise) when stimuli were presented from different positions, rather than from the same position. This spatial redundancy benefit was reduced when the participants adopted a crossed-hands posture, suggesting a failure to remap visuotactile space appropriately. In Experiment 2, JNDs were also lower when pairs of auditory and visual stimuli were presented from different positions, rather than from the same position. Taken together, these results demonstrate that people can use redundant spatial cues to facilitate their performance on multisensory TOJ tasks and suggest that previous studies may have systematically overestimated the precision with which people can make such judgments. These results highlight the intimate link between spatial and temporal factors in determining our perception of the multimodal objects and events in the world around us.

Multisensory interactions follow the hands across the midline: Evidence from a non-spatial visual–tactile congruency task

“…The possibility that crossed hands effects in the tactile modality only occur in the presence of incongruent visual distractors is an interesting one, and is worthy of further research (see also the discussion of this point in ref [24]). Perhaps it is only in the presence of additional visual stimulation in close temporal sequence that tactile crossed hands effects may arise for non-spatial discrimination tasks, suggesting that crossed hands impairments may be due to the conflict between external, allocentric, and internal, somatotopic coordinates.…”

A common perceptual temporal limit of binding synchronous inputs across different sensory attributes and modalities

“…Fifth, using different auditory attributes other than pitch (amplitude modulation, left/right ear alternation) had little effects on the temporal binding limit (electronic supplementary material, figure S5). Sixth, the temporal binding limit of cross-attribute binding remained to be 2-3 Hz even when it was measured under more natural binding situations with regard to spatial alignment (Spence et al 2003) and attribute combination (e.g. Maeda et al 2004; electronic supplementary material, figure S6).…”

The role of the right temporoparietal junction in intersensory conflict: detection or resolution?

“…First, visual and tactile stimuli appearing simultaneously and spatially close on a participant's body, can give rise to congruence effect, even when participants are aware of the potential conflict between them (see Rock & Victor 1964). Previous multisensory studies showed that integration between two sensory modalities is strongly temporally (Shore et al 2002;Spence et al 2003;Yamamoto & Kitazawa 2001) and spatially dependent (Spence et al 1998;Pavani et al 2000). In our study, visual-tactile integration is defined over very specific body parts that lie very close together in external space, their spatial disparity being no more than the few centimeters separating D3 and D4.…”