The effect of attention on the temporal window of multisensory integration

日常行为取决于来自不同来源的感官信息的整合。考虑驾驶汽车的感知挑战。 你必须用视觉来扫描道路，用听觉来倾听警告信号，用触觉来感受方向盘上的张力，甚至在你加速和转弯时，你的前庭系统也会参与其中。 所有这些感官都在真实的时间里轰击感知系统，大脑必须整合相关的刺激，并分离那些不属于一起的刺激。 随着我们的驾驶环境变得更加信息丰富，这种集成问题将会增长。本研究旨在探讨我们有限的注意力系统与感觉统合时间参数之间的相互作用。 大脑使用相对时间，沿着其他线索，来决定不同感官的刺激是否属于一起，然而，这些刺激的相对时间受到我们注意力分配的影响。 特别是，研究人员已经定义了一个时间的“整合窗口”，在此期间，刺激将被绑定到一个单一的事件。 注意力在确定这一时间窗口的程度方面的作用是这项赠款的主要重点。 在直接解决问题之前，需要评估窗口的不同度量。时间处理的直接有意识测量和间接无意识测量都将用于评估窗口的时间范围。赠款可分为两个阶段。第一个定义的感觉统合的措施，并确定如何不同的措施是相关的。第二，使用这些知识来了解注意力如何影响感觉统合的时间特性。 这项研究的结果将与一些应用领域有关：驾驶中多感官警告信号的开发;远程手术等远程呈现应用的增强;视频会议应用的改进。 在临床上，这些发现将有助于理解发展性阅读障碍和脑卒中的一些感知后果。

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.