Perceptual association enhances intersensory temporal precision.

Cognition

Fundació Sant Joan de Déu, Institut de Recerca Sant Joan de Déu, Esplugues de Llobregat, Barcelona, Spain; CiMeC Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Rovereto, Italy.

Published: January 2020

AI Article Synopsis

  • The brain can adjust how we perceive the timing of sensory signals based on their associations with one another.
  • In an experiment, participants were exposed to a circle that was always followed by a tone and a triangle that appeared at random times.
  • Results showed that after 5 minutes, participants were better at judging the timing of the circle and tone together, but not for the triangle, suggesting that learned associations influence our perception of time even when we're not consciously aware of them.

Article Abstract

The brain is able to extract associative regularities between stimuli and readjust the perceived timing of correlated sensory signals. In order to elucidate whether these two mechanisms interact with each other or not, we exposed participants to two different visual stimuli (a circle and a triangle) that appeared continuously and unpredictably, for 5min. While the circle always preceded the tone for 700ms, the triangle did not. Yet, the triangle could appear, by chance, before and after the tone, and between the circle and the tone. In two different test blocks, conducted before and after the 5-min exposure phase, participants performed simultaneity judgments regarding one of the visual stimuli (the circle or the triangle) and the exposed tone presented at different stimulus onset asynchronies. The results revealed that the precision at judging the temporal relation between the 'associated figure' (the circle) and the tone increased significantly after the 5-min exposure. This effect was not observed for the non-associated figure (the triangle) and occurred even when participants reported to be unaware of any association between the stimuli presented. This pattern of results indicates that the perceptual association between sensory signals can influence their subjective temporal processing.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104089DOI Listing

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