Abstract
We constantly integrate multiple types of information from different sensory modalities. Generally, such integration is influenced by the modality that we attend to. However, for duration perception, it has been shown that when duration information from visual and auditory modalities is integrated, the perceived duration of the visual stimulus leaned toward the duration of the auditory stimulus, irrespective of which modality was attended. In these studies, auditory dominance was assessed using visual and auditory stimuli with different durations whose timing of onset and offset would affect perception. In the present study, we aimed to investigate the effect of attention on duration integration using visual and auditory stimuli of the same duration. Since the duration of a visual flicker and auditory flutter tends to be perceived as longer than and shorter than its physical duration, respectively, we used the 10 Hz visual flicker and auditory flutter with the same onset and offset timings but different perceived durations. The participants were asked to attend either visual, auditory, or both modalities. Contrary to the attention-independent auditory dominance reported in previous studies, we found that the perceived duration of the simultaneous flicker and flutter presentation depended on which modality the participants attended. To further investigate the process of duration integration of the two modalities, we applied Bayesian hierarchical modeling, which enabled us to define a flexible model in which the multisensory duration is represented by the weighted average of each sensory modality. In addition, to examine whether auditory dominance results from the higher reliability of auditory stimuli, we applied another models to consider the stimulus reliability. These behavioral and modeling results suggest the following: (1) the perceived duration of visual and auditory stimuli is influenced by which modality the participants attended to when we control for the confounding effect of onset–offset timing of stimuli, and (2) the increase of the weight by attention affects the duration integration, even when the effect of stimulus reliability is controlled. Our models can be extended to investigate the neural basis and effects of other sensory modalities in duration integration.
Highlights
Our perception results from receiving multimodal inputs from one’s surroundings and integrating these inputs as one
The results suggest that visual flicker and auditory flutter induced opposite duration distortions, while the visual or auditory stable stimuli did not induce duration distortions, which was similar to that found in a previous study (Yuasa and Yotsumoto, 2015)
The tendency of auditory dominance in all attention conditions may result from the higher reliability of auditory duration perception rather than visual duration perception. We modeled another Bayesian hierarchical model, which assumed that the different point of subjective equivalence (PSE) of flicker–flutter across the attention condition results from the change in the weight by attention and the weight by reliability (Figure 4)
Summary
Our perception results from receiving multimodal inputs from one’s surroundings and integrating these inputs as one. The ventriloquism effect is the illusory percept, where the perceived location of an auditory stimulus is influenced by the location of the simultaneously presented visual stimulus (Battaglia et al, 2003; Alais and Burr, 2004). This illusion is found in the temporal domain, as the temporal ventriloquism effect, in which the perceived timing of a visual stimulus is drawn to the timing of the auditory stimulus (Klink et al, 2011; Vidal, 2017). Investigating multisensory integration reveals how we perceive our world precisely in daily life
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