The University of Queensland, Queensland Brain Institute and School of Psychology, QLD 4072, Australia.
Cognition. 2011 Jan;118(1):62-74. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2010.09.009. Epub 2010 Oct 25.
A period of exposure to trains of simultaneous but spatially offset auditory and visual stimuli can induce a temporary shift in the perception of sound location. This phenomenon, known as the 'ventriloquist aftereffect', reflects a realignment of auditory and visual spatial representations such that they approach perceptual alignment despite their physical spatial discordance. Such dynamic changes to sensory representations are likely to underlie the brain's ability to accommodate inter-sensory discordance produced by sensory errors (particularly in sound localization) and variability in sensory transduction. It is currently unknown, however, whether these plastic changes induced by adaptation to spatially disparate inputs occurs automatically or whether they are dependent on selectively attending to the visual or auditory stimuli. Here, we demonstrate that robust auditory spatial aftereffects can be induced even in the presence of a competing visual stimulus. Importantly, we found that when attention is directed to the competing stimuli, the pattern of aftereffects is altered. These results indicate that attention can modulate the ventriloquist aftereffect.
一段同时呈现的听觉和视觉刺激序列的暴露期可能会引起声音位置感知的暂时转移。这种现象被称为“腹语效”，反映了听觉和视觉空间表示的重新调整，使得它们尽管在物理空间上存在不和谐，但接近知觉上的一致。这种对感觉表示的动态变化可能是大脑适应由感觉错误（特别是在声音定位中）和感觉转导的可变性产生的感觉不和谐的基础。然而，目前尚不清楚这种由适应空间上不相关的输入引起的可塑性变化是自动发生的，还是依赖于选择性地关注视觉或听觉刺激。在这里，我们证明，即使在存在竞争的视觉刺激的情况下，也可以诱导出强大的听觉空间后效。重要的是，我们发现当注意力指向竞争刺激时，后效模式会发生改变。这些结果表明，注意力可以调节腹语效。
