Abstract
BackgroundOur motor actions normally generate sensory events, but how do we know which events were self generated and which have external causes? Here we use temporal adaptation to investigate the processing stage and generality of our sensorimotor timing estimates.Methodology/Principal FindingsAdaptation to artificially-induced delays between action and event can produce a startling percept—upon removal of the delay it feels as if the sensory event precedes its causative action. This temporal recalibration of action and event occurs in a quantitatively similar manner across the sensory modalities. Critically, it is robust to the replacement of one sense during the adaptation phase with another sense during the test judgment.Conclusions/SignificanceOur findings suggest a high-level, supramodal recalibration mechanism. The effects are well described by a simple model which attempts to preserve the expected synchrony between action and event, but only when causality indicates it is reasonable to do so. We further demonstrate that this model successfully characterises related adaptation data from outside the sensorimotor domain.
Highlights
Self-generated sensory stimuli will typically share a common temporal register–their physical onset times will be closely correlated with the moment in time when the causative motor action is completed
Observers adapted to a fixed delay between the completion of their motor action and either visual, auditory or tactile (a ‘tap’ delivered to the opposite index finger) feedback
Observers were instructed to press the mouse button at intervals of their own choosing so as to ensure their motor actions were entirely voluntary in nature [23,24]
Summary
Self-generated sensory stimuli will typically share a common temporal register–their physical onset times will be closely correlated with the moment in time when the causative motor action is completed. More recent reports suggest that such effects can persist for at least 40 seconds in the absence of updated visual feedback [3] This type of temporal recalibration is reminiscent of the nervous system’s response to spatial misalignment between seen and felt location during prism adaptation experiments Perceptual learning effects observed during interval timing tasks are highly specific to the trained base interval yet readily transfer between visual hemispheres [12], sensory modalities [13], and perceptual to motor tasks [14,15]. Returning to the example of Stetson et al.’s [1] visuo-motor effects, a single, late-stage timing mechanism might be expected to recalibrate all the self generated sensory consequences of motor actions in a similar manner [16]. Our motor actions normally generate sensory events, but how do we know which events were self generated and which have external causes? Here we use temporal adaptation to investigate the processing stage and generality of our sensorimotor timing estimates
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