Sensorimotor synchronization with audio-visual stimuli: limited multisensory integration

Abstract

Understanding how we synchronize our actions with stimuli from different sensory modalities plays a central role in helping to establish how we interact with our multisensory environment. Recent research has shown better performance with multisensory over unisensory stimuli; however, the type of stimuli used has mainly been auditory and tactile. The aim of this article was to expand our understanding of sensorimotor synchronization with multisensory audio-visual stimuli and compare these findings to their individual unisensory counterparts. This research also aims to assess the role of spatio-temporal structure for each sensory modality. The visual and/or auditory stimuli had either temporal or spatio-temporal information available and were presented to the participants in unimodal and bimodal conditions. Globally, the performance was significantly better for the bimodal compared to the unimodal conditions; however, this benefit was limited to only one of the bimodal conditions. In terms of the unimodal conditions, the level of synchronization with visual stimuli was better than auditory, and while there was an observed benefit with the spatio-temporal compared to temporal visual stimulus, this was not replicated with the auditory stimulus.

Impaired Visual Motor Coordination in Obese Adults

“…The significant effects found for frequency for measures of variability of coordination and amplitude of movement for both obese and normal weight groups are also in line with previous research on normal population [17]. As expected, the −20% condition is more difficult to synchronize when compared to other preferred frequencies or +20%.…”

“…The values for CRP obtained for the obese group were significantly higher than the normal weight group whose performance coincides with values found in previous research [17]. This finding indicates that obese subjects had greater difficulty in synchronizing their movements and maintaining their synchrony with the stimulus (Figure 2).…”

“…This task involved a visual motor coordination task where the participant synchronized his movement with computer generated stimuli using a hand-held pendulum [17]. Participants sat in a bariatric chair and placed their right arm in a forearm support.…”

“…This relationship between the sensory integration process and motor behaviour has been extensively studied in typically developing adults [17, 18] and more recently to gain a greater understanding of how this process is altered in autistic [19] and schizophrenic [20] individuals. These pendulum based paradigms allow for the environment, task, and individual constraints to be maintained which allows the mechanisms underlying this complex behaviour to be examined.…”

Rhythmic micro-gestures: discreet interaction on-the-go

“…In contrast, audio only conveyed the start of each beat, which may have helped users perceive the rhythm more quickly. Varlet et al [16] found that discrete audio information was be er than continuous visual information when conveying the timing for rhythmic movements, although later work contradicted this [2]; as such, it is not known if our nding can be explained by perception of rhythm in di erent modalities. However, the important point here is that users can successfully perform our rhythmic micro-gestures without visual a ention, supporting their use as an eyes-free interaction technique.…”