Abstract
Every moment organisms are confronted with complex streams of information which they use to generate a reliable mental model of the world. There is converging evidence for several optimization mechanisms instrumental in integrating (or segregating) incoming information; among them are multisensory interplay (MSI) and temporal expectation (TE). Both mechanisms can account for enhanced perceptual sensitivity and are well studied in isolation; how these two mechanisms interact is currently less well-known. Here, we tested in a series of four psychophysical experiments for TE effects in uni- and multisensory contexts with different levels of modality-related and spatial uncertainty. We found that TE enhanced perceptual sensitivity for the multisensory relative to the best unisensory condition (i.e. multisensory facilitation according to the max-criterion). In the latter TE effects even vanished if stimulus-related spatial uncertainty was increased. Accordingly, computational modelling indicated that TE, modality-related and spatial uncertainty predict multisensory facilitation. Finally, the analysis of stimulus history revealed that matching expectation at trial n-1 selectively improves multisensory performance irrespective of stimulus-related uncertainty. Together, our results indicate that benefits of multisensory stimulation are enhanced by TE especially in noisy environments, which allows for more robust information extraction to boost performance on both short and sustained time ranges.
Highlights
Optimisation of perceptual processing is critical in daily life
We investigated whether temporal expectation (TE) and multisensory interplay (MSI) are two in- or interdependent mechanisms facilitating behavioural performance
We found that participants’ perceptual sensitivity was increased and response times were decreased for expected compared to unexpected trials, and for multisensory compared to the best unisensory trials, in accord with our hypotheses
Summary
Optimisation of perceptual processing is critical in daily life. Misperceiving or even missing targets in our environment can have severe consequences (e.g. in traffic). That analysis approach did not take into account subject-specific preferences which are critical when identifying multisensory facilitation (MSF, i.e. multisensory vs best unisensory response, see below). The max-criterion posits that multisensory performance should exceed the best unisensory performance (maximum perceptual sensitivity or minimum response time), if participants use sensory information of both modalities (auditory and visual). If data Y can be successfully predicted, the parameters of the model may reflect the underlying cognitive process Using this approach, we addressed the critical question whether MSF is best described (predicted) by physical factors (such as proximity of the stimuli, target frequencies etc.) and/or by individual factors (such as the preferred unisensory modality). We will use a complementary cross-validation modelling approach to determine the factors governing MSI in a TE paradigm
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