Arnold Derek H, Nancarrow Kathleen, Yarrow Kielan
Perception Laboratory, School of Psychology, The University of Queensland St. Lucia, QLD, Australia.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2012 Aug 8;6:235. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2012.00235. eCollection 2012.
Determining if we, or another agent, were responsible for a sensory event can require an accurate sense of timing. Our sense of appropriate timing relationships must, however, be malleable as there is a variable delay between the physical timing of an event and when sensory signals concerning that event are encoded in the brain. One dramatic demonstration of such malleability involves having people repeatedly press a button thereby causing a beep. If a delay is inserted between button presses and beeps, when it is subsequently taken away beeps can seem to precede the button presses that caused them. For this to occur it is important that people feel they were responsible for instigating the beeps. In terms of their timing, as yet it is not clear what combination of events is important for motor-sensory temporal recalibration. Here, by introducing ballistic reaches of short or longer extent before a button press, we varied the delay between the intention to act and the sensory consequence of that action. This manipulation failed to modulate recalibration magnitude. By contrast, introducing a similarly lengthened delay between button presses and consequent beeps eliminated recalibration. Thus it would seem that the critical timing relationship for motor-sensory temporal recalibration is between tactile signals relating to the completion of an action and the subsequent auditory percept.
确定我们或其他因素是否对某一感觉事件负责，可能需要精确的时间感知。然而，我们对适当时间关系的感知必须具有可塑性，因为在事件的实际发生时间与大脑中关于该事件的感觉信号被编码的时间之间存在可变延迟。这种可塑性的一个显著例证是让人们反复按下按钮从而发出哔哔声。如果在按钮按下和哔哔声之间插入延迟，随后当延迟被去除时，哔哔声似乎会先于引发它们的按钮按下。要发生这种情况，重要的是人们觉得自己对引发哔哔声负有责任。就时间而言，目前尚不清楚哪些事件组合对运动 - 感觉时间重新校准很重要。在这里，通过在按钮按下之前引入短或长距离的快速伸手动作，我们改变了行动意图与该行动的感觉后果之间的延迟。这种操作未能调节重新校准的幅度。相比之下，在按钮按下和随后的哔哔声之间引入类似延长的延迟则消除了重新校准。因此，对于运动 - 感觉时间重新校准而言，关键的时间关系似乎在于与动作完成相关的触觉信号和随后的听觉感知之间。
