Rapid temporal recalibration to visuo–tactile stimuli

Abstract

For a comprehensive understanding of the environment, the brain must constantly decide whether the incoming information originates from the same source and needs to be integrated into a coherent percept. This integration process is believed to be mediated by temporal integration windows. If presented with temporally asynchronous stimuli for a few minutes, the brain adapts to this new temporal relation by recalibrating the temporal integration windows. Such recalibration can occur even more rapidly after exposure to just a single trial of asynchronous stimulation. While rapid recalibration has been demonstrated for audio–visual stimuli, evidence for rapid recalibration of visuo–tactile stimuli is lacking. Here, we investigated rapid recalibration in the visuo–tactile domain. Subjects received visual and tactile stimuli with different stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA) and were asked to report whether the visuo–tactile stimuli were presented simultaneously. Our results demonstrate visuo–tactile rapid recalibration by revealing that subjects’ simultaneity reports were modulated by the temporal order of stimulation in the preceding trial. This rapid recalibration effect, however, was only significant if the SOA in the preceding trial was smaller than 100 ms, while rapid recalibration could not be demonstrated for SOAs larger than 100 ms. Since rapid recalibration in the audio–visual domain has been demonstrated for SOAs larger than 100 ms, we propose that visuo–tactile recalibration works at shorter SOAs, and thus faster time scales than audio–visual rapid recalibration.