Abstract：
Subsecond temporal processing is crucial for activities requiring precise timing. Here, we investigated perceptual learning of crossmodal (auditory-visual or visual-auditory) temporal interval discrimination (TID) and its impacts on unimodal (visual or auditory) TID performance. The research purpose was to test whether learning is based on a more abstract and conceptual representation of subsecond time, which would predict crossmodal to unimodal learning transfer. The experiments revealed that learning to discriminate a 200-ms crossmodal temporal interval, defined by a pair of visual and auditory stimuli, significantly reduced crossmodal TID thresholds. Moreover, the crossmodal TID training also minimized unimodal TID thresholds with a pair of visual or auditory stimuli at the same interval, even if crossmodal TID thresholds are multiple times higher than unimodal TID thresholds. Subsequent training on unimodal TID failed to reduce unimodal TID thresholds further. These results indicate that learning of high-threshold crossmodal TID tasks can benefit low-threshold unimodal temporal processing, which may be achieved through training-induced improvement of a conceptual representation of subsecond time in the brain.
摘要：
亚秒时间处理对于需要精确计时的活动至关重要。这里,我们调查了跨模态(听觉-视觉或视觉-听觉)时间间隔辨别(TID)的知觉学习及其对单峰(视觉或听觉)TID表现的影响.研究目的是测试学习是否基于亚秒时间的更抽象和概念表示，这将预测跨模态到单峰学习迁移。实验表明，学习区分200毫秒的交叉模态时间间隔，由一对视觉和听觉刺激定义，显著降低跨模态TID阈值。此外，跨模态TID训练还在同一间隔内使用一对视觉或听觉刺激来最小化单峰TID阈值，即使跨模态TID阈值比单峰TID阈值高多倍。随后的单峰TID训练未能进一步降低单峰TID阈值。这些结果表明，高阈值跨模态TID任务的学习可以有益于低阈值单峰时间处理，这可以通过训练引起的对大脑中亚秒级时间的概念表示的改进来实现。
