Dataset Information

Coupled oscillations enable rapid temporal recalibration to audiovisual asynchrony.

ABSTRACT: The brain naturally resolves the challenge of integrating auditory and visual signals produced by the same event despite different physical propagation speeds and neural processing latencies. Temporal recalibration manifests in human perception to realign incoming signals across the senses. Recent behavioral studies show it is a fast-acting phenomenon, relying on the most recent exposure to audiovisual asynchrony. Here we show that the physiological mechanism of rapid, context-dependent recalibration builds on interdependent pre-stimulus cortical rhythms in sensory brain regions. Using magnetoencephalography, we demonstrate that individual recalibration behavior is related to subject-specific properties of fast oscillations (>35 Hz) nested within a slower alpha rhythm (8-12 Hz) in auditory cortex. We also show that the asynchrony of a previously presented audiovisual stimulus pair alters the preferred coupling phase of these fast oscillations along the alpha cycle, with a resulting phase-shift amounting to the temporal recalibration observed behaviorally. These findings suggest that cross-frequency coupled oscillations contribute to forming unified percepts across senses.

SUBMITTER: Lennert T

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8113519 | biostudies-literature | 2021 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Coupled oscillations enable rapid temporal recalibration to audiovisual asynchrony.

Lennert Therese T Samiee Soheila S Baillet Sylvain S

Communications biology 20210511 1

The brain naturally resolves the challenge of integrating auditory and visual signals produced by the same event despite different physical propagation speeds and neural processing latencies. Temporal recalibration manifests in human perception to realign incoming signals across the senses. Recent behavioral studies show it is a fast-acting phenomenon, relying on the most recent exposure to audiovisual asynchrony. Here we show that the physiological mechanism of rapid, context-dependent recalibr ...[more]

PMID: 33976360

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Project description:To obtain a coherent perception of the world, our senses need to be in alignment. When we encounter misaligned cues from two sensory modalities, the brain must infer which cue is faulty and recalibrate the corresponding sense. We examined whether and how the brain uses cue reliability to identify the miscalibrated sense by measuring the audiovisual ventriloquism aftereffect for stimuli of varying visual reliability. To adjust for modality-specific biases, visual stimulus locations were chosen based on perceived alignment with auditory stimulus locations for each participant. During an audiovisual recalibration phase, participants were presented with bimodal stimuli with a fixed perceptual spatial discrepancy; they localized one modality, cued after stimulus presentation. Unimodal auditory and visual localization was measured before and after the audiovisual recalibration phase. We compared participants' behavior to the predictions of three models of recalibration: (a) Reliability-based: each modality is recalibrated based on its relative reliability-less reliable cues are recalibrated more; (b) Fixed-ratio: the degree of recalibration for each modality is fixed; (c) Causal-inference: recalibration is directly determined by the discrepancy between a cue and its estimate, which in turn depends on the reliability of both cues, and inference about how likely the two cues derive from a common source. Vision was hardly recalibrated by audition. Auditory recalibration by vision changed idiosyncratically as visual reliability decreased: the extent of auditory recalibration either decreased monotonically, peaked at medium visual reliability, or increased monotonically. The latter two patterns cannot be explained by either the reliability-based or fixed-ratio models. Only the causal-inference model of recalibration captures the idiosyncratic influences of cue reliability on recalibration. We conclude that cue reliability, causal inference, and modality-specific biases guide cross-modal recalibration indirectly by determining the perception of audiovisual stimuli.

Dataset Information

Coupled oscillations enable rapid temporal recalibration to audiovisual asynchrony.

Publications

Coupled oscillations enable rapid temporal recalibration to audiovisual asynchrony.

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