Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1563, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2012 Jan 1;23(1):6-12. doi: 10.1177/0956797611420662. Epub 2011 Nov 29.
It is well known that the nervous system combines information from different cues within and across sensory modalities to improve performance on perceptual tasks. In this article, we present results showing that in a visual motion-detection task, concurrent auditory motion stimuli improve accuracy even when they do not provide any useful information for the task. When participants judged which of two stimulus intervals contained visual coherent motion, the addition of identical moving sounds to both intervals improved accuracy. However, this enhancement occurred only with sounds that moved in the same direction as the visual motion. Therefore, it appears that the observed benefit of auditory stimulation is due to auditory-visual interactions at a sensory level. Thus, auditory and visual motion-processing pathways interact at a sensory-representation level in addition to the level at which perceptual estimates are combined.
众所周知，神经系统会整合来自不同感觉模态内部和跨模态的信息，以提高感知任务的表现。在本文中，我们展示了这样的结果：在视觉运动检测任务中，即使听觉运动刺激没有为任务提供任何有用信息，它们也能提高准确性。当参与者判断两个刺激间隔中哪一个包含视觉连贯运动时，在两个间隔中添加相同的运动声音会提高准确性。然而，这种增强仅在声音与视觉运动方向相同时发生。因此，听觉刺激的观察到的益处似乎是由于在感觉水平上的听觉-视觉相互作用。因此，除了感知估计组合的水平之外，听觉和视觉运动处理通路还在感觉表示水平上相互作用。
