A Psychophysical Investigation of Differences between Synchrony and Temporal Order Judgments

By Scott A. Love, Karin Petrini, Adam Cheng, Frank E. Pollick. 2013

103 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background Synchrony judgments involve deciding whether cues to an event are in synch or out of synch, while temporal order judgments involve deciding which of the cues came first. When the cues come from different sensory modalities these judgments can be used to investigate multisensory integration in the temporal domain. However, evidence indicates that that these two tasks should not be used interchangeably as it is unlikely that they measure the same perceptual mechanism. The current experiment further explores this issue across a variety of different audiovisual stimulus types. Methodology/Principal Findings Participants were presented with 5 audiovisual stimulus types, each at 11 parametrically manipulated levels of cue asynchrony. During separate blocks, participants had to make synchrony judgments or temporal order judgments. For some stimulus types many participants were unable to successfully make temporal order judgments, but they were able to make synchrony judgments. The mean points of subjective simultaneity for synchrony judgments were all video-leading, while those for temporal order judgments were all audio-leading. In the within participants analyses no correlation was found across the two tasks for either the point of subjective simultaneity or the temporal integration window. Conclusions Stimulus type influenced how the two tasks differed; nevertheless, consistent differences were found between the two tasks regardless of stimulus type. Therefore, in line with previous work, we conclude that synchrony and temporal order judgments are supported by different perceptual mechanisms and should not be interpreted as being representative of the same perceptual process.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Uta Noppeney
2. Hweeling Lee
3. Ladan Shams
4. Charles Spence

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

1. Uta Noppeney
2. Hweeling Lee
3. Charles Spence
4. Yi-Chuan Chen
5. Ladan Shams

In Social Psychology

1. Uta Noppeney
2. Hweeling Lee

Citations in the corpus

• Assessing the Role of the ‘Unity Assumption’ on Multisensory Integration: A Review (2017, neutral): “Here it should be noted that there is an on-going debate in the literature as to whether performance on these two tasks gives rise to compatible results (e.g., van Eijk et al., 2008; García-Pérez and Alcalá-Quintana, 2012; Love et al., 2013).”
• Music expertise shapes audiovisual temporal integration windows for speech, sinewave speech, and music (2014, background): “…and piano music stimuli at 13 audiovisual stimulus onset asynchronies (±360, ±300 ±240, ±180, ±120, ±60, and 0 ms) (Dixon and Spitz, 1980; Alais and Burr, 2003; Grant et al., 2004; Zampini et al., 2005; Vatakis and Spence, 2006a,b, 2007, 2008a,b; van Wassenhove et al., 2007; Love et al., 2013).”