Recent work has shown that the perceived time of motor actions and subsequent visual events can be markedly influenced by recent experience. When observers become accustomed to a delay between motor action and visual event, subsequent events presented with a reduced delay appears to precede the causative motor action (an illusory reversal of perceived temporal order of motor action and related sensory event) (Stetson et al, 2006; Cunningham et al, 2001). However, it remains to be seen if such a fundamental error of temporal order perception also occurs if this effect occurs in the auditory-motor or tactile-motor domains. Here, we replicate earlier work in the visual domain, and extend this by measuring comparable misperceptions of sensorimotor time in the auditory and tactile domains. We demonstrate that the illusion exhibits similar temporal tuning characteristics in all three sensorimotor pairings, with comparable levels of sensitivity to sensorimotor temporal order in all conditions. In conclusion, we demonstrate that illusory reversal of perceived temporal order of motor action and subsequent sensory event is not peculiar to vision, and suggest that a single neural mechanism may mediate the observed effects in all three sensorimotor pairings.

References

Stetson et al. (2006). Motor-Sensory Recalibration Leads to an Illusory Reversal of Action and Sensation. Neuron 51, 671-679.
Cunningham et al. (2001). Sensorimotor adaptation to violations of sensorimotor contiguity. Psychological Science 12 (6), 532-535.