Sensory experience during early sensitive periods shapes cross-modal temporal biases
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.
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Cross-modal temporal biases emerge during early sensitive periodsOpen Science Framework, DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/CQN48.
Article and author information
Author details
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
© 2020, Badde et al.
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.
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Further reading
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During both sleep and awake immobility, hippocampal place cells reactivate time-compressed versions of sequences representing recently experienced trajectories in a phenomenon known as replay. Intriguingly, spontaneous sequences can also correspond to forthcoming trajectories in novel environments experienced later, in a phenomenon known as preplay. Here, we present a model showing that sequences of spikes correlated with the place fields underlying spatial trajectories in both previously experienced and future novel environments can arise spontaneously in neural circuits with random, clustered connectivity rather than pre-configured spatial maps. Moreover, the realistic place fields themselves arise in the circuit from minimal, landmark-based inputs. We find that preplay quality depends on the network’s balance of cluster isolation and overlap, with optimal preplay occurring in small-world regimes of high clustering yet short path lengths. We validate the results of our model by applying the same place field and preplay analyses to previously published rat hippocampal place cell data. Our results show that clustered recurrent connectivity can generate spontaneous preplay and immediate replay of novel environments. These findings support a framework whereby novel sensory experiences become associated with preexisting “pluripotent” internal neural activity patterns.
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