Abstract
Adults integrate multisensory information optimally (e.g., Ernst and Banks, 2002) while children do not integrate multisensory visual-haptic cues until 8–10 years of age (e.g., Gori et al., 2008). Before that age strong unisensory dominance occurs for size and orientation visual-haptic judgments, possibly reflecting a process of cross-sensory calibration between modalities. It is widely recognized that audition dominates time perception, while vision dominates space perception. Within the framework of the cross-sensory calibration hypothesis, we investigate visual-auditory integration in both space and time with child-friendly spatial and temporal bisection tasks. Unimodal and bimodal (conflictual and not) audio-visual thresholds and PSEs were measured and compared with the Bayesian predictions. In the temporal domain, we found that both in children and adults, audition dominates the bimodal visuo-auditory task both in perceived time and precision thresholds. On the contrary, in the visual-auditory spatial task, children younger than 12 years of age show clear visual dominance (for PSEs), and bimodal thresholds higher than the Bayesian prediction. Only in the adult group did bimodal thresholds become optimal. In agreement with previous studies, our results suggest that also visual-auditory adult-like behavior develops late. We suggest that the visual dominance for space and the auditory dominance for time could reflect a cross-sensory comparison of vision in the spatial visuo-audio task and a cross-sensory comparison of audition in the temporal visuo-audio task.
Highlights
Multisensory integration is fundamental for our interaction with the world
Development of visuo-auditory integration 1959; Shipley, 1964), audition dominates in audio-visual time bisection task (Burr et al, 2009), and in general audition seems to affect the interpretation of a visual stimulus under many other conditions. All these results suggest that in the adult visual information has a fundamental role for multisensory space perception, and that audition is fundamental for temporal perception
AUDIO-VISUAL SPACE AND TIME BISECTION IN ADULTS In this study we investigated audio-visual integration in space and in time perception during development
Summary
Multisensory integration is fundamental for our interaction with the world. Many recent studies show that our brain is able to integrate unisensory signals in a statistically optimal fashion, weighting each sense according to its reliability (Clarke and Yuille, 1990; Ghahramani et al, 1997; Ernst and Banks, 2002; Alais and Burr, 2004; Landy et al, 2011). We recently showed that in a visual-haptic integration task (similar to that used by Ernst and Banks, 2002) children younger than 8 years of age show unisensory dominance rather than bimodal integration and the modality that dominates is task specific: the haptic modality dominates bimodal size perception and the visual modality dominates orientation bimodal perception (Gori et al, 2008) This dominance could reflect a process of cross-sensory calibration, where in the developing brain the most robust modality is used to calibrate the others (see Burr and Gori, 2011 for a discussion of this idea). A good deal of evidence suggests that the calibration process may be fundamental to acquire specific perceptual concepts: in particular we have shown that the impairment of the system that should calibrate the other impacts on the modality that needs calibration (Gori et al, 2010, 2012)
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