Abstract
The simultaneous perception of multimodal sensory information has a crucial role for effective reactions to the external environment. Voluntary movements are known to occasionally affect simultaneous perception of auditory and tactile stimuli presented to the moving body part. However, little is known about spatial limits on the effect of voluntary movements on simultaneous perception, especially when tactile stimuli are presented to a non-moving body part. We examined the effect of voluntary movement on the simultaneous perception of auditory and tactile stimuli presented to the non-moving body part. We considered the possible mechanism using a temporal order judgement task under three experimental conditions: voluntary movement, where participants voluntarily moved their right index finger and judged the temporal order of auditory and tactile stimuli presented to their non-moving left index finger; passive movement; and no movement. During voluntary movement, the auditory stimulus needed to be presented before the tactile stimulus so that they were perceived as occurring simultaneously. This subjective simultaneity differed significantly from the passive movement and no movement conditions. This finding indicates that the effect of voluntary movement on simultaneous perception of auditory and tactile stimuli extends to the non-moving body part.
Highlights
IntroductionHao et al.’s finding[3] suggested that the improvement of temporal resolution in Nishi et al.’s study[2] was caused by the predictability of stimulus onset, and the lack of difference in PSSs between voluntary movement and no movement conditions was concealed by the lack of short-range stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) in Frissen et al.’s study[5]
The TOJ task is often used to investigate the temporal perception of multimodal sensory information[9,10,11,12,13,14,15], in which participants are asked to judge the temporal order of two stimuli presented at various stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs)
In the passive movement and no movement conditions, the participant’s right index finger was moved by a device or held stationary, respectively, and participant judged the temporal order of auditory and tactile stimuli presented to the non-moving left index finger
Summary
Hao et al.’s finding[3] suggested that the improvement of temporal resolution in Nishi et al.’s study[2] was caused by the predictability of stimulus onset, and the lack of difference in PSSs between voluntary movement and no movement conditions was concealed by the lack of short-range SOAs in Frissen et al.’s study[5]. These studies[1,2,3] suggested that voluntary movements affected the simultaneous perception of visual–tactile stimuli and auditory– tactile stimuli, when the tactile stimulus was presented to the moving body part.
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