Social and communicative not a prerequisite: Preverbal infants learn an abstract rule only from congruent audiovisual dynamic pitch-height patterns.

Learning in the everyday environment often requires the flexible integration of relevant multisensory information. Previous research has demonstrated preverbal infants' capacity to extract an abstract rule from audiovisual temporal sequences matched in temporal synchrony. Interestingly, this capacity was recently reported to be modulated by crossmodal correspondence beyond spatiotemporal matching (e.

Smooth pursuit inhibition reveals audiovisual enhancement of fast movement control.

The sudden onset of a visual object or event elicits an inhibition of eye movements at latencies approaching the minimum delay of visuomotor conductance in the brain. Typically, information presented via multiple sensory modalities, such as sound and vision, evokes stronger and more robust responses than unisensory information. Whether and how multisensory information affects ultra-short latency oculomotor inhibition is unknown.

Prior visual experience increases children's use of effective haptic exploration strategies in audio-tactile sound-shape correspondences.

Sound-shape correspondence refers to the preferential mapping of information across the senses, such as associating a nonsense word like bouba with rounded abstract shapes and kiki with spiky abstract shapes. Here we focused on audio-tactile (AT) sound-shape correspondences between nonsense words and abstract shapes that are felt but not seen. Despite previous research indicating a role for visual experience in establishing AT associations, it remains unclear how visual experience facilitates AT correspondences.

Body Pitch Together With Translational Body Motion Biases the Subjective Haptic Vertical.

Accurate perception of verticality is critical for postural maintenance and successful physical interaction with the world. Although previous research has examined the independent influences of body orientation and self-motion under well-controlled laboratory conditions, these factors are constantly changing and interacting in the real world. In this study, we examine the subjective haptic vertical in a real-world scenario.

Eye movements during optic flow perception.

Optic flow is an important visual cue for human perception and locomotion and naturally triggers eye movements. Here we investigate whether the perception of optic flow direction is limited or enhanced by eye movements. In Exp.

Collinear search impairment is luminance contrast invariant.

Collinear search impairment (CSI) is a phenomenon where a task-irrelevant collinear structure impairs a target search in a visual display. It has been suggested that CSI is monocular, occurs without the participants' access to consciousness and is possibly processed at an early visual site (e.g.

The feeling of "kiki": Comparing developmental changes in sound-shape correspondence for audio-visual and audio-tactile stimuli.

Sound-shape crossmodal correspondence, the naturally occurring associations between abstract visual shapes and nonsense sounds, is one aspect of multisensory processing that strengthens across early childhood. Little is known regarding whether school-aged children exhibit other variants of sound-shape correspondences such as audio-tactile (AT) associations between tactile shapes and nonsense sounds. Based on previous research in blind individuals suggesting the role of visual experience in establishing sound-shape correspondence, we hypothesized that children would show weaker AT association than adults and that children's AT association would be enhanced with visual experience of the shapes.

Look where you go: Characterizing eye movements toward optic flow.

When we move through our environment, objects in the visual scene create optic flow patterns on the retina. Even though optic flow is ubiquitous in everyday life, it is not well understood how our eyes naturally respond to it. In small groups of human and non-human primates, optic flow triggers intuitive, uninstructed eye movements to the focus of expansion of the pattern (Knöll, Pillow, & Huk, 2018).

Individual Differences in Multisensory Interactions:The Influence of Temporal Phase Coherence and Auditory Salience on Visual Contrast Sensitivity.

While previous research has investigated key factors contributing to multisensory integration in isolation, relatively little is known regarding how these factors interact, especially when considering the enhancement of visual contrast sensitivity by a task-irrelevant sound. Here we explored how auditory stimulus properties, namely salience and temporal phase coherence in relation to the visual target, jointly affect the extent to which a sound can enhance visual contrast sensitivity. Visual contrast sensitivity was measured by a psychophysical task, where human adult participants reported the location of a visual Gabor pattern presented at various contrast levels.

Thermal-Tactile Integration in Object Temperature Perception.

The brain consistently faces a challenge of whether and how to combine the available information sources to estimate the properties of an object explored by hand. While object perception is an inference process involving multisensory inputs, thermal referral (TR) is an illusion demonstrating how the interaction between thermal and tactile systems can lead to deviations from physical reality-when observers touch three stimulators simultaneously with the middle three fingers of one hand but only the outer two stimulators are heated (or cooled), thermal uniformity is perceived across three fingers. Here, we used TR of warmth to examine the thermal-tactile interaction in object temperature perception.

What makes a shape "baba"? The shape features prioritized in sound-shape correspondence change with development.

Crossmodal sound-shape correspondence, the association of abstract shapes and nonsense words (e.g., "bouba-kiki" effect), is seen across cultures and languages.

Preverbal infants utilize cross-modal semantic congruency in artificial grammar acquisition.

Learning in a multisensory world is challenging as the information from different sensory dimensions may be inconsistent and confusing. By adulthood, learners optimally integrate bimodal (e.g.

Prefer feeling bad? Subcultural differences in emotional preferences between Han Chinese and Mongolian Chinese.

As a multi-ethnic country that is comprised of diverse cultural systems, there has been little research on the subcultural differences in emotional preferences in China. Also, little attention has been paid to examine how explicit and implicit attitudes towards emotions influence emotional preferences interactively. In this study, we manipulated explicit attitudes towards emotions among Han (N = 62) and Mongolian Chinese individuals (N = 70).

Cross-modal attention influences auditory contrast sensitivity: Decreasing visual load improves auditory thresholds for amplitude- and frequency-modulated sounds.

We used a cross-modal dual task to examine how changing visual-task demands influenced auditory processing, namely auditory thresholds for amplitude- and frequency-modulated sounds. Observers had to attend to two consecutive intervals of sounds and report which interval contained the auditory stimulus that was modulated in amplitude (Experiment 1) or frequency (Experiment 2). During auditory-stimulus presentation, observers simultaneously attended to a rapid sequential visual presentation-two consecutive intervals of streams of visual letters-and had to report which interval contained a particular color (low load, demanding less attentional resources) or, in separate blocks of trials, which interval contained more of a target letter (high load, demanding more attentional resources).

Eye of origin guides attention away: An ocular singleton column impairs visual search like a collinear column.

Collinearity and eye of origin were recently discovered to guide attention: Target search is impaired if it is overlapping with a collinear structure (Jingling & Tseng, 2013) but enhanced if the target is an ocular singleton (Zhaoping, 2008). Both are proposed to occur in V1, and we study their interaction here. In our 9 × 9 search display (Experiment 1), all columns consisted of horizontal bars except for one randomly selected column that contained orthogonal bars (collinear distractor).

Bimodal emotion congruency is critical to preverbal infants' abstract rule learning.

Extracting general rules from specific examples is important, as we must face the same challenge displayed in various formats. Previous studies have found that bimodal presentation of grammar-like rules (e.g.

Invisible collinear structures impair search.

Visual attention and perceptual grouping both help us from being overloaded by the vast amount of information, and attentional search is delayed when a target overlaps with a snake-like collinear distractor (Jingling & Tseng, 2013). We assessed whether awareness of the collinear distractor is required for this modulation. We first identified that visible long (=9 elements), but not short (=3 elements) collinear distractor slowed observers' detection of an overlapping target.

Collinear integration affects visual search at V1.

Perceptual grouping plays an indispensable role in figure-ground segregation and attention distribution. For example, a column pops out if it contains element bars orthogonal to uniformly oriented element bars. Jingling and Tseng (2013) have reported that contextual grouping in a column matters to visual search behavior: When a column is grouped into a collinear (snakelike) structure, a target positioned on it became harder to detect than on other noncollinear (ladderlike) columns.

Falling skyscrapers: when cross-modal perception of verticality fails.

The perception of verticality is critical for balance control and interaction with the world. But this complex process fails badly under certain circumstances-usually as the result of an illusion. Here, we report on a real-world example of how the brain fails to disregard body position on a moving mountain tram and adopts an inappropriate frame of reference, which prompts passengers to perceive skyscrapers leaning by as much as 30°.