Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN, USA.
Exp Brain Res. 2012 May;219(1):121-37. doi: 10.1007/s00221-012-3072-1. Epub 2012 Mar 24.
In natural environments, human sensory systems work in a coordinated and integrated manner to perceive and respond to external events. Previous research has shown that the spatial and temporal relationships of sensory signals are paramount in determining how information is integrated across sensory modalities, but in ecologically plausible settings, these factors are not independent. In the current study, we provide a novel exploration of the impact on behavioral performance for systematic manipulations of the spatial location and temporal synchrony of a visual-auditory stimulus pair. Simple auditory and visual stimuli were presented across a range of spatial locations and stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), and participants performed both a spatial localization and simultaneity judgment task. Response times in localizing paired visual-auditory stimuli were slower in the periphery and at larger SOAs, but most importantly, an interaction was found between the two factors, in which the effect of SOA was greater in peripheral as opposed to central locations. Simultaneity judgments also revealed a novel interaction between space and time: individuals were more likely to judge stimuli as synchronous when occurring in the periphery at large SOAs. The results of this study provide novel insights into (a) how the speed of spatial localization of an audiovisual stimulus is affected by location and temporal coincidence and the interaction between these two factors and (b) how the location of a multisensory stimulus impacts judgments concerning the temporal relationship of the paired stimuli. These findings provide strong evidence for a complex interdependency between spatial location and temporal structure in determining the ultimate behavioral and perceptual outcome associated with a paired multisensory (i.e., visual-auditory) stimulus.
在自然环境中，人类的感觉系统以协调和综合的方式工作，以感知和响应外部事件。先前的研究表明，感觉信号的空间和时间关系对于确定信息如何在感觉模态之间整合至关重要，但在生态上合理的环境中，这些因素并不是独立的。在当前的研究中，我们对视觉-听觉刺激对的空间位置和时间同步的系统操纵对行为表现的影响进行了新的探索。简单的听觉和视觉刺激在一系列空间位置和刺激起始时的异步（SOA）下呈现，参与者执行空间定位和同时性判断任务。定位成对的视听刺激的反应时间在外围和较大的 SOA 时较慢，但最重要的是，发现这两个因素之间存在相互作用，其中 SOA 的影响在外围相对于中央位置更大。同时性判断也揭示了空间和时间之间的新相互作用：当在大 SOA 处的外围发生时，个体更有可能判断刺激是同步的。这项研究的结果提供了新的见解：（a）视听刺激的空间定位速度如何受到位置和时间巧合以及这两个因素之间的相互作用的影响；（b）多感觉刺激的位置如何影响对配对刺激的时间关系的判断。这些发现为确定与配对多感觉（即视觉-听觉）刺激相关的最终行为和感知结果的空间位置和时间结构之间的复杂相互依存关系提供了有力的证据。
