Battaglia Peter W, Jacobs Robert A, Aslin Richard N
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, The Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627, USA.
J Opt Soc Am A Opt Image Sci Vis. 2003 Jul;20(7):1391-7. doi: 10.1364/josaa.20.001391.
Human observers localize events in the world by using sensory signals from multiple modalities. We evaluated two theories of spatial localization that predict how visual and auditory information are weighted when these signals specify different locations in space. According to one theory (visual capture), the signal that is typically most reliable dominates in a winner-take-all competition, whereas the other theory (maximum-likelihood estimation) proposes that perceptual judgments are based on a weighted average of the sensory signals in proportion to each signal's relative reliability. Our results indicate that both theories are partially correct, in that relative signal reliability significantly altered judgments of spatial location, but these judgments were also characterized by an overall bias to rely on visual over auditory information. These results have important implications for the development of cue integration and for neural plasticity in the adult brain that enables humans to optimally integrate multimodal information.
人类观察者通过使用来自多种模态的感觉信号来对世界中的事件进行定位。我们评估了两种空间定位理论，这两种理论预测了当这些信号在空间中指定不同位置时视觉和听觉信息是如何加权的。根据一种理论（视觉捕获），通常最可靠的信号在赢家通吃的竞争中占主导地位，而另一种理论（最大似然估计）则提出，知觉判断是基于感觉信号的加权平均值，其权重与每个信号的相对可靠性成比例。我们的结果表明，这两种理论都部分正确，因为相对信号可靠性显著改变了空间位置的判断，但这些判断的特征还在于总体上倾向于依赖视觉而非听觉信息。这些结果对线索整合的发展以及成人大脑中使人类能够最佳整合多模态信息的神经可塑性具有重要意义。
