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Recalibration of audiovisual simultaneity

Nature Neuroscience volume 7, pages 773–778 (2004)Cite this article

Abstract

To perceive the auditory and visual aspects of a physical event as occurring simultaneously, the brain must adjust for differences between the two modalities in both physical transmission time and sensory processing time. One possible strategy to overcome this difficulty is to adaptively recalibrate the simultaneity point from daily experience of audiovisual events. Here we report that after exposure to a fixed audiovisual time lag for several minutes, human participants showed shifts in their subjective simultaneity responses toward that particular lag. This 'lag adaptation' also altered the temporal tuning of an auditory-induced visual illusion, suggesting that adaptation occurred via changes in sensory processing, rather than as a result of a cognitive shift while making task responses. Our findings suggest that the brain attempts to adjust subjective simultaneity across different modalities by detecting and reducing time lags between inputs that likely arise from the same physical events.

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Figure 1: The time course of the stimulus sequence used to test the effects of audiovisual lag adaptation on simultaneity judgments.
Figure 2: The effects of audiovisual (AV) lag adaptation on simultaneity judgments.
Figure 3: Effects of audiovisual (AV) lag adaptation on the stream/bounce illusion.
Figure 4: The lag aftereffect for various combinations of adaptation and test stimuli.

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Acknowledgements

We thank D. Arnold, M. Changizi, T. Hirahara, A. Johnston and D. Wu. This work was partially supported by the Human Frontier Science Program (RGP0070/2003-C).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. NTT Communication Science Laboratories, NTT Corporation, 3-1 Morinosato Wakamiya, Atsugi, 243-0198, Kanagawa, Japan

    Waka Fujisaki, Shinsuke Shimojo, Makio Kashino & Shin'ya Nishida

  2. Division of Biology, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, 91125, California, USA

    Shinsuke Shimojo

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  1. Waka Fujisaki
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Correspondence to Shin'ya Nishida.

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Fujisaki, W., Shimojo, S., Kashino, M. et al. Recalibration of audiovisual simultaneity. Nat Neurosci 7, 773–778 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1268

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