Barnett-Cowan Michael
Department of Psychology, The Brain and Mind Institute, The University of Western Ontario, Natural Sciences Centre, London, Ontario, Canada.
Multisens Res. 2013;26(4):387-403.
Multisensory stimuli originating from the same event can be perceived asynchronously due to differential physical and neural delays. The transduction of and physiological responses to vestibular stimulation are extremely fast, suggesting that other stimuli need to be presented prior to vestibular stimulation in order to be perceived as simultaneous. There is, however, a recent and growing body of evidence which indicates that the perceived onset of vestibular stimulation is slow compared to the other senses, such that vestibular stimuli need to be presented prior to other sensory stimuli in order to be perceived synchronously. From a review of this literature it is speculated that this perceived latency of vestibular stimulation may reflect the fact that vestibular stimulation is most often associated with sensory events that occur following head movement, that the vestibular system rarely works alone, that additional computations are required for processing vestibular information, and that the brain prioritizes physiological response to vestibular stimulation over perceptual awareness of stimulation onset. Empirical investigation of these theoretical predictions is encouraged in order to fully understand this surprising result, its implications, and to advance the field.
由于物理和神经延迟的差异，源自同一事件的多感官刺激可能会被异步感知。前庭刺激的转导和生理反应极其迅速，这表明为了被感知为同时发生，其他刺激需要在前庭刺激之前呈现。然而，最近有越来越多的证据表明，与其他感官相比，前庭刺激的感知起始较慢，以至于前庭刺激需要在其他感官刺激之前呈现才能被同步感知。从对该文献的综述推测，这种前庭刺激的感知潜伏期可能反映了以下事实：前庭刺激最常与头部运动后发生的感觉事件相关联；前庭系统很少单独起作用；处理前庭信息需要额外的计算；大脑对前庭刺激的生理反应优先于对刺激起始的感知意识。为了充分理解这一惊人结果及其影响，并推动该领域的发展，鼓励对这些理论预测进行实证研究。
