Abstract
Perceiving temporal relationships between sensory events is a key process for recognising dynamic environments. Temporal order judgement (TOJ) and simultaneity judgement (SJ) are used for probing this perceptual process. TOJ and SJ exhibit identical psychometric parameters. However, there is accumulating psychophysical evidence that distinguishes TOJ from SJ. Some studies have proposed that the perceptual processes for SJ (e.g., detecting successive/simultaneity) are also included in TOJ, whereas TOJ requires more processes (e.g., determination of the temporal order). Other studies have proposed two independent processes for TOJ and SJ. To identify differences in the neural activity associated with TOJ versus SJ, we performed functional magnetic resonance imaging of participants during TOJ and SJ with identical tactile stimuli. TOJ-specific activity was observed in multiple regions (e.g., left ventral and bilateral dorsal premotor cortices and left posterior parietal cortex) that overlap the general temporal prediction network for perception and motor systems. SJ-specific activation was observed only in the posterior insular cortex. Our results suggest that TOJ requires more processes than SJ and that both TOJ and SJ implement specific process components. The neural differences between TOJ and SJ thus combine features described in previous psychophysical hypotheses that proposed different mechanisms.
Highlights
Perceiving temporal relationships between sensory events is a key process for recognising dynamic environments
Within the ventral attention network, the authors remarked that the temporal parietal junction (TPJ) is essential for attention and temporal order judgement (TOJ). We focused on their results showing that the TOJ-related regions overlapped with regions that participate in motor control[32,33,34,35], such as the premotor cortex (PMC), posterior parietal cortex (PPC), and cerebellum
During functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning, 16 participants performed TOJ and simultaneity judgement (SJ) for two tactile stimuli, one stimulus delivered to each hand, with closed eyes (Fig. 1)
Summary
Perceiving temporal relationships between sensory events is a key process for recognising dynamic environments. This crossed-arm deficit suggests that the brain processes the spatial locations of the hands before temporally ordering the tactile signals from the respective hands In another popular task, simultaneity judgement (SJ), participants judge whether two stimuli are presented simultaneously or successively. Perceptual adaptation to a coherent lag between audio and visual stimuli has been identified using SJ11 This lag adaptation effect has been observed in audiovisual[4,12,13,14,15] and other cross-modal[16,17] TOJs. the experimental results of TOJ and SJ have sometimes been discussed in the context of the assumption that both tasks reflect the same
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