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Neural basis of auditory-induced shifts in visual time-order perception

Abstract

Attended objects are perceived to occur before unattended objects even when the two objects are presented simultaneously. This finding has led to the widespread view that attention modulates the speed of neural transmission in the various perceptual pathways. We recorded event-related potentials during a time-order judgment task to determine whether a reflexive shift of attention to a sudden sound modulates the speed of sensory processing in the human visual system. Attentional cueing influenced the perceived order of lateralized visual events but not the timing of event-related potentials in visual cortex. Attentional cueing did, however, enhance the amplitude of neural activity in visual cortex, which shows that attention-induced shifts in visual time-order perception can arise from modulations of signal strength rather than processing speed in the early visual-cortical pathways.

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Figure 1: Experimental setup.
Figure 2: Mean percentage of trials in which participants reported seeing the target on the cued side before the target on the uncued side as a function of the cued side onset advantage (CSOA).
Figure 3: Grand-averaged ERPs to simultaneous visual targets, averaged over the 79% of trials in which participants indicated that the target on the cued side appeared first.
Figure 4
Figure 5: Dipole model of the neural sources of the left-cued minus right-cued difference wave.
Figure 6: Target ERPs obtained at the point of subjective simultaneity.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank D.R. Heraldez and M.M. Marlow for technical assistance and L.M. Ward for providing access to research equipment. This research was supported by grants from the National Institute for Mental Health (MH 25594), Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (227959) and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation.

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Correspondence to John J McDonald.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Fig. 1

Grand-averaged ERPs obtained when the uncued target was presented 70 ms before the cued target, averaged separately according to which target was reported to appear first. (PDF 193 kb)

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McDonald, J., Teder-Sälejärvi, W., Di Russo, F. et al. Neural basis of auditory-induced shifts in visual time-order perception. Nat Neurosci 8, 1197–1202 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1512

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