Verhaal Josine, Luksch Harald
Chair of Zoology, Technische Universität München, Freising-Weihenstephan 85350, Germany
Chair of Zoology, Technische Universität München, Freising-Weihenstephan 85350, Germany.
J Exp Biol. 2016 Jan;219(Pt 1):90-5. doi: 10.1242/jeb.129387. Epub 2015 Nov 13.
In everyday life we constantly perceive and discriminate between a large variety of sensory inputs, the vast majority of which consist of more than one modality. We performed two experiments to investigate whether chickens use the information present in multimodal signals. To test whether audiovisual stimuli are better detected than visual or acoustic stimuli alone, we first measured the detection threshold with a staircase paradigm. We found that chickens were able to detect weaker stimuli using audiovisual stimuli. Next, we tested whether the multimodal nature of a stimulus also increases the discrimination between two stimuli by measuring the smallest difference that the animals could still distinguish from each other. We found that chickens can discriminate smaller differences using audiovisual stimuli in comparison to visual stimuli alone, but not in comparison to acoustic stimuli alone. Thus, even in a relatively unspecialized species such as the chicken, the benefits of multimodal integration are exploited for sensory processing.
在日常生活中，我们不断感知并区分各种各样的感官输入，其中绝大多数包含不止一种模态。我们进行了两项实验，以研究鸡是否会利用多模态信号中存在的信息。为了测试视听刺激是否比单独的视觉或听觉刺激更容易被检测到，我们首先使用阶梯法测量了检测阈值。我们发现，鸡能够利用视听刺激检测到较弱的刺激。接下来，我们通过测量动物仍能彼此区分的最小差异，测试了刺激的多模态性质是否也会增加两种刺激之间的辨别力。我们发现，与单独的视觉刺激相比，鸡使用视听刺激能够区分更小的差异，但与单独的听觉刺激相比则不然。因此，即使在像鸡这样相对不专门化的物种中，多模态整合的优势也被用于感官处理。
