Abstract
It has now been well established that the point of subjective synchrony for audio and visual events can be shifted following exposure to asynchronous audio-visual presentations, an effect often referred to as temporal recalibration. Recently it was further demonstrated that it is possible to concurrently maintain two such recalibrated estimates of audio-visual temporal synchrony. However, it remains unclear precisely what defines a given audio-visual pair such that it is possible to maintain a temporal relationship distinct from other pairs. It has been suggested that spatial separation of the different audio-visual pairs is necessary to achieve multiple distinct audio-visual synchrony estimates. Here we investigated if this is necessarily true. Specifically, we examined whether it is possible to obtain two distinct temporal recalibrations for stimuli that differed only in featural content. Using both complex (audio visual speech; see Experiment 1) and simple stimuli (high and low pitch audio matched with either vertically or horizontally oriented Gabors; see Experiment 2) we found concurrent, and opposite, recalibrations despite there being no spatial difference in presentation location at any point throughout the experiment. This result supports the notion that the content of an audio-visual pair alone can be used to constrain distinct audio-visual synchrony estimates regardless of spatial overlap.
Highlights
Many events in our everyday environment produce signals that can be perceived by multiple sensory modalities
The PSS was taken as the peak of a truncated Gaussian function fitted to participants’ response distributions obtained from audio-visual synchrony/asynchrony judgments for that condition completed during Test phases
We conducted a repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) on the SD data of the fitted functions. This revealed no significant difference between different stimuli or adaptation conditions (F ’s < 5.135; p’s > 0.086; overall mean SD = 143.98 ms). These results are consistent with participants having concurrently adapted to opposite temporal relationships for the different stimulus combinations regardless of spatial overlap of presentation
Summary
Many events in our everyday environment produce signals that can be perceived by multiple sensory modalities. Transduction of sound by the hair cells of the inner ear is quicker than photo-transduction of light by the retina, resulting in processing latency differences up to ∼50 ms (King, 2005). These differences in physical and neural transmission speeds will cancel each other out at observer distances of ∼10–15 m, but stimulus attributes can contribute to this variance. Discrepancies in the relative timing of audio and visual signals in the order of 10’s of milliseconds can be expected at varying event distances and signal intensities
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