Abstract
Prolonged exposure, or adaptation, to a stimulus in 1 modality can bias, but also enhance, perception of a subsequent stimulus presented within the same modality. However, recent research has also found that adaptation in 1 modality can bias perception in another modality. Here, we show a novel crossmodal adaptation effect, where adaptation to a visual stimulus enhances subsequent auditory perception. We found that when compared to no adaptation, prior adaptation to visual, auditory, or audiovisual hand actions enhanced discrimination between 2 subsequently presented hand action sounds. Discrimination was most enhanced when the visual action “matched” the auditory action. In addition, prior adaptation to a visual, auditory, or audiovisual action caused subsequent ambiguous action sounds to be perceived as less like the adaptor. In contrast, these crossmodal action aftereffects were not generated by adaptation to the names of actions. Enhanced crossmodal discrimination and crossmodal perceptual aftereffects may result from separate mechanisms operating in audiovisual action sensitive neurons within perceptual systems. Adaptation-induced crossmodal enhancements cannot be explained by postperceptual responses or decisions. More generally, these results together indicate that adaptation is a ubiquitous mechanism for optimizing perceptual processing of multisensory stimuli.
Highlights
Prolonged exposure, or adaptation, to a stimulus in 1 modality can bias, and enhance, perception of a subsequent stimulus presented within the same modality
Adaptation-induced perceptual enhancement is dependent upon similarity between the adapting and test stimuli (Kohn, 2007); we tested if visual knock actions enhanced knock sound discrimination more than visual slap actions
The results of Experiment 1 show that adaptation to auditory, visual, or audiovisual hand actions can enhance the discriminability of subsequent auditory hand actions
Summary
Adaptation, to a stimulus in 1 modality can bias, and enhance, perception of a subsequent stimulus presented within the same modality. Evidence of crossmodal aftereffects has been used to argue for the existence of supramodal representations of simple stimuli (e.g., motion; Konkle et al, 2009), as well as more complex social information (e.g., emotion; Pye & Bestelmeyer, 2015) In all these previous studies, evidence for crossmodal adaptation has relied upon measurements of shifts in the central tendency of psychometric functions fitted to observers’ estimates of single stimuli (Hills et al, 2010; Pye & Bestelmeyer, 2015), or adaptation-induced biases in the categorization of individually presented ambiguous stimuli (Kitagawa & Ichihara, 2002; Konkle et al, 2009; Skuk & Schweinberger, 2013; Zaske et al, 2010). These previous studies have reported crossmodal aftereffects as perceptual biases due to neural adaptation, the use of the Bmethod of single stimuli^ in all of these studies precludes their ability to distinguish genuine adaptation-induced perceptual biases from postperceptual response biases (see Morgan, Dillenburger, Raphael, & Solomon, 2012; Morgan, Melmoth, & Solomon, 2013; Storrs, 2015)
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