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A contingent aftereffect in the auditory system

Nature Neuroscience volume 2, pages 863–865 (1999)Cite this article

Abstract

Pairs of stimulus attributes, such as color and orientation, that are normally uncorrelated in the real world are generally perceived independently; that is, the perception of color is usually uninfluenced by orientation and vice versa. Yet this independence can be altered by relatively brief exposure to artificially correlated stimuli, as has been shown for vision1. Here we report an analogous contingent aftereffect in the auditory system that can persist for four hours after the initial adaptation.

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Figure 1: Stimulus protocols.
Figure 2: The magnitude of the auditory contingent aftereffect, in degrees per second, as a function of time after exposure.
Figure 3: Comparison of decays of contingent and simple auditory motion aftereffects as a function of time after adaptation.

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Acknowledgements

We thank S. Lee, G. Stjepanovic and J. Qiu for participating in the experiments as subjects. This research was supported by a NSERC grant (Canada) to M.S.C.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ophthalmology, University of British Columbia, 2550 Willow Street, Vancouver, V5Z 3N9, British Columbia, Canada

    C.-J. Dong, N. V. Swindale & M. S. Cynader

Authors
  1. C.-J. Dong
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  2. N. V. Swindale
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  3. M. S. Cynader
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Correspondence to C.-J. Dong.

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Dong, CJ., Swindale, N. & Cynader, M. A contingent aftereffect in the auditory system. Nat Neurosci 2, 863–865 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1038/13161

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