Abstract
Perception of synchrony between one's own action (a finger tap) and the sensory feedback thereof (a visual flash or an auditory pip) can be recalibrated after exposure to an artificially inserted delay between them (temporal recalibration effect: TRE). TRE might be mediated by a compensatory shift of motor timing (when did I tap?) and/or the sensory timing of the feedback (when did I hear/see the feedback?). To examine this, we asked participants to voluntarily tap their index finger at a constant pace while receiving visual or auditory feedback (a flash or pip) that was either synced or somewhat delayed relative to the tap. Following this exposure phase, they then performed a simple reaction time (RT) task to measure the sensory timing of the exposure stimulus, and a sensorimotor synchronization (SMS) task (tapping in synchrony with a flash or pip as pacing stimulus) to measure the point of subjective synchrony between the tap and pacing stimulus. The results showed that after exposure to delayed auditory feedback, participants tapped earlier (~21.5 ms) relative to auditory pacing stimuli (= temporal recalibration) and reacted faster (~5.6 ms) to auditory stimuli. For visual exposure and test stimuli, there were no such compensatory effects. These results indicate that adjustments of audio-motor synchrony can to some extent be explained by a change in the speed of auditory sensory processing. We discuss this in terms of an attentional modulation of sensory processing.
Highlights
Precise and flexible control of action is of crucial importance for human behavior in everyday life
Sugano et al [20] have shown that the magnitude of sensorimotor temporal recalibration effect (TRE) is greater for audio-motor than visuo-motor pairings. They have shown that visuo-motor TRE transfers to audiomotor domain, but not vice versa. These results suggest that modality-specific mechanisms might be involved in the sensorimotor TRE
Trials from the practice session were excluded from further analysis
Summary
Precise and flexible control of action is of crucial importance for human behavior in everyday life. Smooth action requires a proper order of movements with correct timings that can be learned with practice Even after these skills have been learned, they should be modifiable in order to adapt to rapid changes in environmental conditions [1, 2, 3] as well as to gradual change like growth in body size [4] that give rise to changes in neural transmission time. From this point of view, it can be argued that sensorimotor learning is a continuous recalibration process of when and how motor commands should be issued [1, 5, 6].
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