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The Temporal Window of Visuotactile Integration

dc.contributor.advisorShore, David
dc.contributor.authorZhou, Yichu
dc.contributor.departmentPsychologyen_US
dc.date.accessioned2016-09-23T18:31:38Z
dc.date.available2016-09-23T18:31:38Z
dc.date.issued2016
dc.description.abstractThe simultaneity judgment (SJ) and temporal order judgment (TOJ) tasks are the two widely used methods for measuring the window of multisensory integration; however, there are some indications that these two tasks involve different cognitive processes and therefore produce unrelated results. The present study measured observers’ visuotactile window of integration using these two tasks in order to examine whether or not SJs and TOJs produce consistent results for this particular pairing of modalities. Experiment 1 revealed no significant correlations between the SJ and TOJ tasks, indicating that they appear to measure distinct processes in visuotactile integration, and in addition showed that both sensory and decisional factors contribute to this difference. These findings were replicated in Experiment 2, which, along with Experiment 3, also showed that the reliability of the SJ and TOJ tasks may in part be responsible for the lack of agreement between these two tasks. A secondary result concerned the point of subjective simultaneity (PSS), which were tactile-leading across all three experiments. This contradicts some of the previous literature in visuotactile integration. Manipulating the spatial distance between the visual and tactile stimulus (Experiment 2) and the certainty of stimulus location (Experiment 3) did not lead to significant changes of the location of the PSS.en_US
dc.description.degreeMaster of Science (MSc)en_US
dc.description.degreetypeThesisen_US
dc.description.layabstractPerception often involves the use of more than one sensory modality at the same time; for example, touching an object usually produces sensory signals in the visual and tactile modalities. Since the amount of time needed to transmit and process sensory signals is different among the modalities, the brain allows for a certain time difference between signals of various pairs of modalities that it will consider as coming from one event. Two tasks commonly used to measure these allowable time differences are the simultaneity judgment (SJ) and temporal order judgment (TOJ) tasks. Although they are usually used interchangeably, the present data show that the results from these tasks in the visuotactile pairing of modalities are unrelated, and a major contributing reason appears to be that these tasks are not the most reliable.en_US
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/11375/20429
dc.language.isoen_USen_US
dc.subjectMultisensory integrationen_US
dc.subjectSimultaneity judgmenten_US
dc.subjectTemporal order judgmenten_US
dc.titleThe Temporal Window of Visuotactile Integrationen_US
dc.typeThesisen_US

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