Schnupp Jan W H, Dawe Karen L, Pollack Gabriella L
University Laboratory of Physiology, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford , OX1 3PT, UK.
Exp Brain Res. 2005 Apr;162(2):181-90. doi: 10.1007/s00221-004-2136-2. Epub 2004 Dec 15.
The detection of a stimulus can be considerably facilitated if the stimulus engages two or more sensory modalities simultaneously. This phenomenon, commonly referred to as multisensory (or cross-modal) facilitation, has been demonstrated behaviorally in cats and humans. A number of rules are thought to govern this phenomenon. These rules state that strong facilitation is to be expected only if the two sensory modalities are stimulated simultaneously and at the same place, and if the stimuli themselves are weak. However, these rules are not sufficient to allow accurate predictions of multimodal stimulus detection probabilities directly from physical stimulus parameters. Here we show that such predictions are possible on the basis of a simple and biologically plausible psychophysical model, which relates the detection of audio-visual, audio-tactile or visual-tactile stimuli to the Euclidean distance that these stimuli span in an orthogonal sensory space.
如果刺激同时涉及两种或更多种感觉模态，那么对该刺激的检测会得到极大促进。这种现象通常被称为多感觉（或跨模态）促进，已在猫和人类身上得到行为学证明。人们认为有一些规则支配着这一现象。这些规则表明，只有当两种感觉模态同时且在同一位置受到刺激，并且刺激本身较弱时，才有望出现强烈的促进作用。然而，这些规则并不足以直接根据物理刺激参数准确预测多模态刺激检测概率。在此我们表明，基于一个简单且符合生物学原理的心理物理学模型可以进行此类预测，该模型将视听、听触觉或视触觉刺激的检测与这些刺激在正交感觉空间中跨越的欧几里得距离联系起来。
