The effect of attention on the temporal window of multisensory integration

日常行为依赖于来自不同来源的感觉信息的整合。考虑一下驾驶汽车的知觉挑战。你必须用视觉来扫视道路，用听觉来倾听警告信号，用触觉来感觉方向盘上的紧张，甚至在你加速和转弯时，你的前庭系统也会参与其中。所有这些感官都实时轰炸知觉系统，大脑必须整合相关的刺激，并将不属于一起的刺激分开。随着我们的驾驶环境变得更加信息丰富，这种集成问题将会加剧。本研究考察了我们的有限容量注意系统与感觉整合的时间参数之间的相互作用。大脑使用相对计时以及其他线索来决定呈现给不同感官的刺激是否属于一起，然而，这些刺激的相对计时受到我们注意力分配的影响。特别是，研究人员定义了一个时间“整合窗口”，在此期间，刺激将被绑定到单个事件中。注意在确定这一时间窗口范围方面的作用构成了这项赠款的主要重点。在直接攻击问题之前，需要评估窗口的不同措施。时间加工的直接有意识测量和间接无意识测量将被用来评估窗口的时间范围。这笔赠款可以分为两个阶段。第一个定义了感觉整合的测量，并确定了不同测量之间的关系。第二，利用这些知识来理解注意力如何影响感觉整合的时间特性。这项研究的结果将与一些应用领域有关：开发驾驶中的多感官警告信号；加强远程手术等远程呈现应用；改进视频会议应用。在更临床上，这些发现将与理解发育性阅读障碍和中风的一些知觉后果相关。

Everyday behaviour depends on the integration of sensory information from different sources. Consider the perceptual challenge of driving a car. You must use vision to scan the road, audition to listen for warning signals, touch to sense the tension on the steering wheel, and even your vestibular system is involved as you accelerate and turn corners. All of these senses bombard the perceptual system in real time and the brain must integrate related stimuli and segregate those that do not belong together. As our driving environments become even more information rich, this integration problem will grow. The present proposal examines the interaction between our limited capacity attention system and the temporal parameters of sensory integration. The brain uses relative timing, along with other cues, to decide if stimuli presented to different senses belong together, yet, the relative timing of those stimuli are affected by our allocation of attention. In particular, researchers have defined a temporal "window of integration" during which stimuli will be bound into a single event. The role of attention in determining the extent of this temporal window forms the main focus of this grant. Before attacking the problem directly, the different measures of the window need to be evaluated. Both direct conscious measures of temporal processing and indirect unconscious measures will be used to assess the temporal extent of the window. The grant can be broken down into two phases. The first defines the measures of sensory integration and determines how the different measures are related. The second, uses this knowledge to understand how attention affects the temporal properties of sensory integration. The findings from this research will be relevant to a number of applied areas: the development of multisensory warning signals in driving; the enhancement of tele-presence applications such as remote surgery; the improvement of video conferencing applications. More clinically, these findings will be relevant to understanding developmental dyslexia and some of the perceptual consequences of cerebral stroke.