Reciprocal Interference Between Audition and Touch inthe Perception of Duration.

Lia Villanueva,Massimiliano Zampini

doi:10.1163/22134808-00002583

Abstract

Audition and touch interact with one another and share a number of similarities; however, little is known about their interplay in the perception of temporal duration. The present study intended to investigate whether the temporal duration of an irrelevant auditory or tactile stimulus could modulate the perceived duration of a target stimulus presented in the other modality (i.e., tactile or auditory) adopting both a between-participants (Experiment1) and a within-participants (Experiment2) experimental design. In a two-alternative forced-choice task, participants decided which of two events in a target modality was longer. The simultaneously distractor stimuli were presented with a duration that was either congruent or incongruent to the target's. Results showed that both the auditory and tactile modalities affected duration judgments in the incongruent condition, decreasing performance in both experiments. Moreover, in Experiment1, the tactile modality enhanced the perception of auditory stimuli in the congruent condition, but audition did not facilitate performance for the congruent condition in the tactile modality; this tactile enhancement of audition was not found in Experiment2. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study documenting audiotactile interactions in the perception of duration, and suggests that audition and touch might modulate one another in a more balanced manner, in contrast to audiovisual pairings. The findings support previous evidence as to the shared links and reciprocal influences when audition and touch interact with one another.

Highlights

The emotional brain is a network of key brain areas including the prefrontal cortex (PFC), amygdala, hypothalamus and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) (Dalgleish, 2004; Tovot et al, 2015)
If an emotional response to a given stimulus results in a residual activation when the stimulus disappears, so that the subsequent emotional response becomes a mixture of this residual response and the emotional response triggered by the new stimulus, we expect the rating for a given stimulus to be higher when the residual activation is high than when it is low
In Experiment 2, for the valence rating, we replicated these findings, even though participants did not rate the emotional stimuli on the previous passive trial, indicating that an explicit emotional judgement is not a prerequisite for observing a positive serial dependence

Summary

Introduction

The emotional brain is a network of key brain areas including the prefrontal cortex (PFC), amygdala, hypothalamus and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) (Dalgleish, 2004; Tovot et al, 2015). Emotional experience and affective appraisal are the results of the integration of both processing routes taking into account the context and previous experiences (van Erp et al, 2016). This integration and interpretation of information is a typical function of the prefrontal cortex (Isotani et al, 2002). This network, starting with the amygdala, receives information from all sensory systems (LeDoux, 2007; McDonald, 1998), and it is not surprising that emotional information perceived via different sensory systems interacts with each other (Schreuder et al, 2016). Multisensory interactions are typically observed when the information from different sensory modalities is temporally or spatially aligned (Alais & Burr, 2004; McGurk & MacDonald, 1976; Morein-Zamir et al, 2003; Philippi et al, 2008; Shams et al, 2000; Shipley, 1964; Van der Burg et al, 2011, 2013a; Vroomen & De Gelder, 2000), and decreases with increasing asynchrony (Noel et al, 2015; Slutsky & Recanzone, 2001; Van der Burg et al, 2010, 2014; Van Wassenhove et al, 2007)

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