Roseboom Warrick, Nishida Shin'ya, Arnold Derek H
School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.
J Vis. 2009 Nov 10;9(12):4.1-8. doi: 10.1167/9.12.4.
Humans exist in an environment wherein many unrelated events occur in close spatial and temporal proximity. Audio-visual timing experiments, however, have often examined only isolated pairs of sensory events. We therefore decided to assess how audio-visual timing perception would be shaped by the presence of an additional audio or visual event. We found that the point of subjective synchrony for a sensory event can be shifted away from the presence of other temporally proximate events. These interactions made audio-visual pairs seem unrelated, or asynchronous, at timings at which they had seemed synchronous when presented in isolation. This shows that the interval across which humans are insensitive to audio-visual asynchrony is not fixed, but dynamic, shaped by interactions between multiple sensory events. Importantly, we establish that these interactions can enhance the sensitivity of timing judgments. These interactions could therefore help to segregate unrelated sensory events across time. Such effects are likely to be common in the cluttered environments in which humans exist.
人类生存的环境中，许多不相关的事件在空间和时间上紧密相邻发生。然而，视听定时实验通常只研究孤立的感官事件对。因此，我们决定评估额外的音频或视觉事件的存在如何塑造视听定时感知。我们发现，一个感官事件的主观同步点可能会因其他时间上接近的事件的存在而发生偏移。这些相互作用使得视听对在单独呈现时看似同步的时间点上显得不相关或异步。这表明人类对视听异步不敏感的时间间隔不是固定的，而是动态的，由多个感官事件之间的相互作用塑造。重要的是，我们确定这些相互作用可以提高定时判断的灵敏度。因此，这些相互作用有助于在时间上分离不相关的感官事件。这种效应在人类所处的杂乱环境中可能很常见。
