Parise Cesare V, Ernst Marc O
Cognitive Neuroscience Department, University of Bielefeld (DE), Bielefeld, Germany.
Department of Psychology, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom.
Elife. 2025 Jan 22;12:RP90841. doi: 10.7554/eLife.90841.
Audiovisual information reaches the brain via both sustained and transient input channels, representing signals' intensity over time or changes thereof, respectively. To date, it is unclear to what extent transient and sustained input channels contribute to the combined percept obtained through multisensory integration. Based on the results of two novel psychophysical experiments, here we demonstrate the importance of the transient (instead of the sustained) channel for the integration of audiovisual signals. To account for the present results, we developed a biologically inspired, general-purpose model for multisensory integration, the multisensory correlation detectors, which combines correlated input from unimodal transient channels. Besides accounting for the results of our psychophysical experiments, this model could quantitatively replicate several recent findings in multisensory research, as tested against a large collection of published datasets. In particular, the model could simultaneously account for the perceived timing of audiovisual events, multisensory facilitation in detection tasks, causality judgments, and optimal integration. This study demonstrates that several phenomena in multisensory research that were previously considered unrelated, all stem from the integration of correlated input from unimodal transient channels.
视听信息通过持续和瞬态输入通道到达大脑，分别代表信号强度随时间的变化或其变化情况。迄今为止，尚不清楚瞬态和持续输入通道在多大程度上有助于通过多感官整合获得的综合感知。基于两项新颖的心理物理学实验结果，我们在此证明了瞬态（而非持续）通道对于视听信号整合的重要性。为了解释当前结果，我们开发了一种受生物启发的多感官整合通用模型——多感官相关探测器，它结合了来自单峰瞬态通道的相关输入。除了解释我们心理物理学实验的结果外，该模型还能定量复制多感官研究中最近的几项发现，这是针对大量已发表数据集进行测试得出的。特别是，该模型可以同时解释视听事件的感知时间、检测任务中的多感官促进、因果判断和最优整合。这项研究表明，多感官研究中以前被认为不相关的几种现象，都源于单峰瞬态通道相关输入的整合。
