The Impact of Pitch on Tempo-Spatial Accuracy and Precision in Intercepting a Virtually Moving Ball

Abstract

The project was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) with two grants awarded to Markus Raab (RA 940/15-2) and Rouwen Cañal-Bruland (CA 635/2-2).

Auditory perception dominates in motor rhythm reproduction

“…Bedford, 2001; Van Wassenhove et al, 2007), observers tend to attribute stimuli from different modalities to the same event resulting in the so-called unity assumption (cf. Jackson, 1953; Welch & Warren, 1980). However, an observer's assumption of unity does not necessarily imply that stimuli from different sensory sources contribute to perception to an equal extent.…”

“…In addition, there are a plethora of studies suggesting that different sensory modalities interact and may even interfere with each other (for an overview, see Shimojo & Shams, 2001). In particular, there is evidence that the perceived intensity of a stimulus in one sensory modality is modulated by the simultaneous presentation of a second stimulus in another sensory modality (Sanabria et al, 2007; Shipley, 1964)—a phenomenon referred to as intersensory bias (Lukas et al, 2014; Welch & Warren, 1980). Following Welch and Warren (1980), the strength of intersensory bias is defined by structural factors (e.g., spatiotemporal discrepancy or coincidence) and cognitive factors (e.g., awareness on intersensory discrepancies, assumption of unity, compelling [i.e., stimulating] features of the situation).…”

“…Welch and Warren (1980) proposed that intersensory bias emerges because the perceptual system attempts to offer a percept that is most convenient for successfully solving the task at hand, implying that some modalities seem to be more suitable for certain task dimensions than others. In this regard, previous research predominantly focused on the visual modality (see e.g., Hutmacher, 2019) revealing an exceptionally robust bias of vision over audition, for instance, in terms of stimulus localization (Alais & Burr, 2004; Howard & Templeton, 1966; Lukas et al, 2014; Stratton, 1897) or speech perception (McGurk & MacDonald, 1976).…”

“…Especially within the temporal domain, auditory stimuli were shown to dominate over visual stimuli in terms of judging interval duration and stimulus frequency (Burr et al, 2009; Gebhard & Mowbray, 1959; Recanzone, 2003; Shipley, 1964; Welch et al, 1986). Moreover, auditory information can also modify aspects of vision as sound signals have been shown to affect the perceived duration (Walker & Scott, 1981), stimulus intensity (Stein et al, 1996), and timing of a visual stimulus (Aschersleben & Bertelson, 2003; Fendrich & Corballis, 2001; Morein-Zamir et al, 2003; Parise & Spence, 2008; Shams et al, 2000) as well as manual interception (Tolentino-Castro et al, 2022). Additionally, auditory input can either increase or decrease visual temporal resolution (Shimojo et al, 2001) and alter the perceptual interpretation of an ambiguous (Sekuler et al, 1997) or nonambiguous visual event (Shams et al, 2000; Zampini & Spence, 2004).…”

Effects of visual blur and contrast on spatial and temporal precision in manual interception

“…Regarding the modality of stimulus presentation, future research about the differences in sensitivity towards spatial and temporal information may also focus on the auditory modality, as it has been shown that the auditory system is more dominated by temporal than by spatial information (O'Connor and Hermelin 1972;Recanzone 2009). It follows that another way to test the hypothesis we sought to shed light on in this paper, may be to manipulate the quality of auditory information, thereby testing the counterpart of the hypothesis, namely that reductions of auditory qualities should more strongly affect temporal than spatial precision (Tolentino-Castro et al 2021).…”