Sensory experience during early sensitive periods shapes cross-modal temporal biases

Abstract
Data availability
Article and author information
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Abstract

Typical human perception features stable biases such as perceiving visual events as later than synchronous auditory events. The origin of such perceptual biases is unknown. To investigate the role of early sensory experience, we tested whether a congenital, transient loss of pattern vision, caused by bilateral dense cataracts, has sustained effects on audio-visual and tactile-visual temporal biases and resolution. Participants judged the temporal order of successively presented, spatially separated events within and across modalities. Individuals with reversed congenital cataracts showed a bias towards perceiving visual stimuli as occurring earlier than auditory (Expt. 1) and tactile (Expt. 2) stimuli. This finding stood in stark contrast to normally sighted controls and sight-recovery individuals who had developed cataracts later in childhood: both groups exhibited the typical bias of perceiving vision as delayed compared to audition. These findings provide strong evidence that cross-modal temporal biases depend on sensory experience during an early sensitive period.

Data availability

All data have been deposited on Open Science Framework under CQN48.

The following data sets were generated

1. Badde S
2. Ley P
3. Rajendran SS
4. Shareef I
5. Kekunnaya R
6. Röder B
(2019) Cross-modal temporal biases emerge during early sensitive periods
Open Science Framework, DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/CQN48.

https://osf.io/cqn48/?view_only=4dbd07d2a62d4ebaa52eecf14abd6caa

Article and author information

Author details

Stephanie Badde

Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, United States

For correspondence
stephanie.badde@nyu.edu

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-4005-5503
Pia Ley

Department of Psychology, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Siddhart S Rajendran

Department of Psychology, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
Idris Shareef

Child Sight Institute, Jasti V Ramanamma Children's Eye Care Center, LV Prasad Eye Institute, Hyderabad, India

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-9258-2199
Ramesh Kekunnaya

Child Sight Institute, Jasti V Ramanamma Children's Eye Care Center, LV Prasad Eye Institute, Hyderabad, India

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-5789-2300
Brigitte Röder

Biological Psychology and Neuropsychology, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

Competing interests
The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Funding

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (BA 5600/1-1)

Stephanie Badde

H2020 European Research Council (ERC-2009-AdG 249425 CriticalBrainChanges)

Brigitte Röder

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG Ro 2625/10-1)

Brigitte Röder

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: All participants or, if applicable, their legal guardian, provided written informed consent before beginning the experiment. The study was conducted in accordance with the ethical guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki and was approved by the ethical board of the German Psychological Society as well as the local ethical committee of the LV Prasad Eye Institute.

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.