Auditory-Visual and Tactile-Visual Temporal Recalibration
Mirjam Keetels, Jean Vroomen
Poster
Last modified: 2008-05-15
Abstract
It is known that the brain adapts to small (~100 ms) auditory-visual (AV) temporal asynchronies so as to maintain intersensory temporal coherence (Vroomen et al, 2004). Here we explored whether the effect also occurred for tactile-visual (TV) pairs and whether spatial disparity between A and V affects temporal recalibration. Participants were exposed to a train of asynchronous AV or TV stimulus pairs. Following a short exposure phase, participants were tested on an AV and TV temporal order judgement (TOJ) task. Temporal recalibration manifested itself as a shift of subjective simultaneity in the direction of the adapted lag. The shift was equally big for AV and TV stimulus pairs (Keetels and Vroomen, 2008), and for when exposure and test stimuli were presented from the same or different locations (Keetels and Vroomen, 2007). These results provide evidence for the idea that temporal recalibration is a more general phenomenon that maintains appropriate on timing between the senses. Moreover, spatial co-localisation is not necessary for intersensory pairing to occur.