Host: Prof. Aihua Chen, East China Normal University
Abstract:
Our experience of the world is inherently multisensory. Sensory signals from one modality are always received in combination with sensory signals from other modalities. Perception is also highly influenced by context and recent history (serial dependence). In a series of recent studies, we tested cross-modal serial dependence of visual-vestibular self-motion perception. Moreover, we examined how attention and external feedback modulate serial dependence. Across experiments, we systematically found that two different factors of recent history – the prior stimulus, and prior choice – differentially affected subsequent perceptual decisions. While previous stimuli led to negative (repulsive) effects, previous choices led to positive (attractive) effects. In both uni-modal and cross-modal conditions, previous stimuli elicited a repulsive effect on the subsequent perceptual decision. In two follow up experiments, we found that these effects remained even when attention was diverted away from the previous stimuli (using a distractor task), and that the attractive effects of serial dependence were largely unaffected by feedback for correct choices. By contrast, feedback for incorrect choices led to choice switching – both within and across modalities. In two other cross-modal studies, of audio-visual temporal perception, more complex and context dependent cross-modal recalibration was seen. In a different set of experiments testing augmentation of self-motion perception, we found that humans can integrate synthetic auditory cues with vestibular cues of self-motion to improve perception. However, the integration was sub-optimal: vestibular cues were over-weighted. Moreover, EEG recording during passive vestibular self-motion stimuli revealed that lateral self-motions elicited stronger brain responses vs. longitudinal, even they covered the same objective distance. This effect was mirrored by augmented perception of lateral vs. longitudinal self-motion distances. In this talk, I will present the various results from these studies, and discuss what can be learned from the presence or absence and different types of (uni-/cross-modal) serial dependence and perceptual augmentation.
Biography:
Adam Zaidel is an Associate Professor at the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar Ilan University, where he heads the Multisensory Processing Laboratory. Adam completed his B.Sc. in electrical engineering at Tel Aviv University. He did his PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, under the guidance of Hagai Bergman and Zvi Israel on deep brain stimulus for Parkinson’s disease. During his postdoc, Adam studied the brain mechanisms of multisensory perception in the lab of Dora Angelaki at Washington University, St Louis MO and Baylor College of Medicine, Houston TX.
This event is open to the NYU Shanghai, East China Normal University, and Neuroscience community.