What is it about?
The ability to understand multisensory environments requires your brain to compute which sensory stimuli should be integrated and which stimuli should be segregated. The relative timing between stimuli is key to this ability. This has effects on perception—such as determining whether you perceive stimuli as synchronous or asynchronous—and action—such as determining whether you obtain faster reaction times to stimuli. We found that perceptual integration was strongly affected by both short-term experience (exposure to prior stimuli) and long-term experience (musical training). However, reaction times were affected differently by musical training and were unaffected by short-term experience. This suggests that perception- and action-based measures of temporal integration are affected differently by experience and represent different sensory integration processes.
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Why is it important?
This research provides insight into the differences between perception and action in multisensory processing and how individual differences in multisensory expertise (musical training) affect such processing.
Perspectives
This study and previous work show that multisensory expertise (musical training) can modulate multisensory processing even for stimuli as basic as white dots and tones. Moreover, the effects on perception and action are different. It would be interesting to assess the nature of these effects: are they sensory or are they higher level (e.g. decisional)? I suspect that decisional factors, such as motivation, attention, and strategies, are the driving force. But this is interesting in itself: what is it about musical training that is associated with such higher level changes in perception and behaviour?
Matthew O'Donohue
Macquarie University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Effects of short- and long-term experience on two classical measures of the multisensory temporal integration window., Journal of Experimental Psychology Human Perception & Performance, March 2025, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/xhp0001278.
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