Multisensory Congruency Enhances Explicit Awareness in a Sequence Learning Task
We examined the effect of audiovisual training on learning a repeated sequence of motor responses. Participants were trained with either congruent or incongruent audiovisual cues to produce motor responses. Learning was tested by comparing reaction times to untrained sequences and by asking participants to recreate the trained sequence. A strong association was found between the two measures and the majority of high-scoring participants belonged to the congruent audiovisual condition. Because the second measure requires explicit knowledge of the trained sequence, we conclude that audiovisual congruency facilitates explic...
Source: Multisensory research - June 27, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Andrew E. Silva, Brandon K. Barakat, Luis O. Jimenez and Ladan Shams Source Type: research
Seeing the Way: the Role of Vision in Conversation Turn Exchange Perception
We presented clips containing single utterances spoken by single individuals engaged in a natural conversation with another. These utterances were from either right before a turn exchange (i.e., when the current talker would finish and the other would begin) or were utterances where the same talker would continue speaking. In Experiment 1, participants were presented audiovisual, auditory-only and visual-only versions of our stimuli and identified whether a turn exchange would occur or not. We demonstrated that although participants could identify turn exchanges with unimodal information alone, they performed best in the...
Source: Multisensory research - June 27, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Nida Latif, Agn ès Alsius and K. G. Munhall Source Type: research
Long-Term Musical Training Alters Tactile Temporal-Order Judgment
The objective of this study was to study the impact of musical training on RTs and accuracy for the crossed arm TOJ task. Seventeen musicians and 20 controls were tested. Musicians had significantly faster RTs for all crossed arm conditions and half of the uncrossed conditions. However, musicians had significantly more TOJ errors for the crossed posture. We speculate that faster musician TOJ RTs leave little time to consolidate conflicting internal and external task-related information when crossing the arms, leading to increased incorrect responses. These results provide novel insights on the potential mechanisms underlyi...
Source: Multisensory research - June 27, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Simon P. Landry and François Champoux Source Type: research
Multisensory Integration in Migraine: Recent Developments (Advance Article)
Source:Page Count 15There are well-documented unimodal sensory differences in migraine compared to control groups both during, and between migraine attacks. There is also some evidence of multisensory integration differences in migraine groups compared to control groups, however the literature on this topic is more limited. There are interesting avenues in the area of visual –vestibular integration, which might have practical implications, e.g., motion sickness and nausea in migraine. Recent work has been investigating the possibility of visual–auditory integration in migraine, and found possible differences in the sus...
Source: Multisensory research - June 27, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Louise O ’Hare Source Type: research
Introduction to the Special Issue on Synaesthesia and Cross-Modal Perception
Source:Volume 30, Issue 3-5, pp 195 - 197 (Source: Multisensory research)
Source: Multisensory research - May 30, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Fiona N. Newell Source Type: research
Individual Alpha Frequency Relates to the Sound-Induced Flash Illusion (Advance Article)
Source:Page Count 14Ongoing neural oscillations reflect fluctuations of cortical excitability. A growing body of research has underlined the role of neural oscillations for stimulus processing. Neural oscillations in the alpha band have gained special interest in electrophysiological research on perception. Recent studies proposed the idea that neural oscillations provide temporal windows in which sensory stimuli can be perceptually integrated. This also includes multisensory integration. In the current high-density EEG-study we examined the relationship between the individual alpha frequency (IAF) and cross-modal audiovis...
Source: Multisensory research - May 24, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Julian Keil and Daniel Senkowski Source Type: research
Assessing Individual Variation in Personality and Empathy Traits in Self-Reported Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response
This study is the first to examine whether self-reported ASMR is associated with individual differences in personality characteristics compared to general population. To do so we administered the Big Five Inventory (BFI) and the Inter-Personal Reactivity Index (IRI) to a group of individuals reporting to experience ASMR and a matched control group. Our findings showed that ASMR self-reporters scored higher on Openness to Experience and lower on Conscientiousness measures of BFI. They also showed greater scores on Empathic Concern and Fantasizing subscale of IRI. These findings are discussed in the context of the personalit...
Source: Multisensory research - May 24, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Agnieszka B. Janik McErlean and Michael J. Banissy Source Type: research
Forty Years After : the McGurk Effect Revisited
Source:Page Count 34Since its discovery 40 years ago, the McGurk illusion has been usually cited as a prototypical paradigmatic case of multisensory binding in humans, and has been extensively used in speech perception studies as a proxy measure for audiovisual integration mechanisms. Despite the well-established practice of using the McGurk illusion as a tool for studying the mechanisms underlying audiovisual speech integration, the magnitude of the illusion varies enormously across studies. Furthermore, the processing of McGurk stimuli differs from congruent audiovisual processing at both phenomenological and neural leve...
Source: Multisensory research - May 24, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Agn ès Alsius, Martin Paré and Kevin G. Munhall Source Type: research
Trombones Elicit Bitter More Strongly Than Do Clarinets: a Partial Replication of Three Studies of Crisinel and Spence
We present a partial replication of the crossmodal pitch/taste correspondence of Crisinel and Spence. Male college students (n=46) were asked to judge the pitch (F1 –C4 on trombone; F3–C6 on clarinet) that best corresponded with each of four tastants (unsweetened coffee, unsweetened chocolate, salt, and sugar). With trombone there was a significant effect of tastant [F(3,135)=7.574, p (Source: Multisensory research)
Source: Multisensory research - May 8, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Quentin J. Watson and Karen L. Gunther Source Type: research
The Role of Pitch and Tempo in Sound-Temperature Crossmodal Correspondences
Source:Page Count 14We explored the putative existence of crossmodal correspondences between sound attributes and beverage temperature. An online pre-study was conducted first, in order to determine whether people would associate the auditory parameters of pitch and tempo with different imagined beverage temperatures. The same melody was manipulated to create a matrix of 25 variants with five different levels of both pitch and tempo. The participants were instructed to imagine consuming hot, room-temperature, or cold water, then to choose the melody that best matched the imagined drinking experience. The results revealed t...
Source: Multisensory research - May 8, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Qian (Janice) Wang and Charles Spence Source Type: research
Sounds Are Perceived as Louder When Accompanied by Visual Movement
In this study, we present three experiments investigating the influence of visual movement on auditory judgements. In Experiments 1 and 2, two bursts of noise were presented and participants were required to judge which was louder using a forced-choice task. One of the two bursts was accompanied by a moving disc. The other burst either was accompanied by no visual stimulus (Experiment 1) or by a static disc (Experiment 2). When the two sounds were of identical intensity participants judged the sound accompanied by the moving disc as louder. The effect was greater when auditory stimuli were of the same intensity but it w...
Source: Multisensory research - May 3, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Marcello Maniglia, Massimo Grassi and Jamie Ward Source Type: research
Serotonergic Modulation of Sensory and Multisensory Processing in Superior Colliculus
Source:Volume 30, Issue 2, pp 121 - 158The ability to integrate information across the senses is vital for coherent perception of and interaction with the world. While much is known regarding the organization and function of multisensory neurons within the mammalian superior colliculus (SC), very little is understood at a mechanistic level. One open question in this regard is the role of neuromodulatory networks in shaping multisensory responses. While the SC receives substantial serotonergic projections from the raphe nuclei, and serotonergic receptors are distributed throughout the SC, the potential role of serotonin (5-...
Source: Multisensory research - May 3, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: LeAnne R. Kurela and Mark T. Wallace Source Type: research
Sound Properties Associated With Equiluminant Colours
Source:Page Count 26There is a widespread tendency to associate certain properties of sound with those of colour (e.g., higher pitches with lighter colours). Yet it is an open question how sound influences chroma or hue when properly controlling for lightness. To examine this, we asked participants to adjust physically equiluminant colours until they ‘went best’ with certain sounds. For pure tones, complex sine waves and vocal timbres, increases in frequency were associated with increases in chroma. Increasing the loudness of pure tones also increased chroma. Hue associations varied depending on the type of stimuli. In...
Source: Multisensory research - May 2, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Giles Hamilton-Fletcher, Christoph Witzel, David Reby and Jamie Ward Source Type: research
Distributed Visual –Vestibular Processing in the Cerebral Cortex of Man and Macaque
Source:Page Count 30Recent advances in understanding the neurobiological underpinnings of visual –vestibular interactions underlying self-motion perception are reviewed with an emphasis on comparisons between the macaque and human brains. In both species, several distinct cortical regions have been identified that are active during both visual and vestibular stimulation and in some of these t here is clear evidence for sensory integration. Several possible cross-species homologies between cortical regions are identified. A key feature of cortical organization is that the same information is apparently represented in mult...
Source: Multisensory research - April 21, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Andrew T. Smith, Mark W. Greenlee, Gregory C. DeAngelis and Dora E. Angelaki Source Type: research
Ignoring Irrelevant Information: Enhanced Intermodal Attention in Synaesthetes
Source:Page Count 25Despite the fact that synaesthetes experience additional percepts during their inducer-concurrent associations that are often unrelated or irrelevant to their daily activities, they appear to be relatively unaffected by this potentially distracting information. This might suggest that synaesthetes are particularly good at ignoring irrelevant perceptual information coming from different sensory modalities. To investigate this hypothesis, the performance of a group of synaesthetes was compared to that of a matched non-synaesthete group in two different conflict tasks aimed at assessing participants ’ ab...
Source: Multisensory research - April 21, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: Anna Mas-Casades ús and Elena Gherri Source Type: research
