The influence of temporal asynchrony on multisensory integration in the processing of asynchronous audio-visual stimuli of real-world events: an event-related potential study.

In this study, we manipulated the temporal asynchrony between auditory and visual inputs, and contrasted event-related potentials (ERPs) evoked by multisensory stimuli with the summation of the ERPs evoked by unisensory-auditory (A) and unisensory-visual (V) stimuli with the same temporal asynchrony. Our goal was to investigate the influence of temporal asynchrony on multisensory integration. In our experiment, the auditory and visual inputs in the multisensory stimuli had a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of -300 ms, 0 ms, or 300 ms. The results suggested that when the auditory and visual inputs were synchronous, multisensory integrations would occur in the time windows of 110-160 ms, 210-250 ms and 300-350 ms after auditory onset. When the auditory onset preceded the critical action onset by 300 ms, multisensory integrations were involved in the time windows of 110-160 ms and 300-350 ms after auditory onset. When the critical action onset preceded the auditory onset by 300 ms, multisensory integrations would occur in the time windows of 110-160 ms, 210-250 ms, 290-320 ms and 350-400 ms after auditory onset. In addition, in the time windows of 110-160 ms and 210-250 ms, the integrations were stronger when the auditory and visual inputs were synchronous, and in the time window of 250-400 ms, multisensory integrations would be different as the SOAs were different. It was suggested that multisensory integration would occur regardless of the asynchrony between auditory and visual inputs, and multisensory integration could be influenced by temporal asynchrony.