Temporal order judgment criteria are affected by synchrony judgment sensitivity.

Area of Science:

• Auditory-visual perception
• Psychophysics
• Sensory integration

Background:

• Synchrony perception for audio-visual stimuli is crucial for multisensory integration.
• Temporal order judgment (TOJ) and synchrony judgment (SJ) tasks are common methods to study this perception.
• Discrepancies exist between the point of subjective simultaneity (PSS) estimates from TOJ and SJ tasks.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if the PSS estimate in a TOJ task is influenced by the sensitivity profile of the SJ task.
• To determine if criterion shifts in TOJ tasks align with regions of highest sensitivity in SJ tasks.

Main Methods:

• Participants performed both temporal order judgment (TOJ) and synchrony judgment (SJ) tasks with audio-visual stimuli.
• Analysis focused on comparing the point of subjective simultaneity (PSS) estimates derived from each task.
• Investigated the relationship between PSS shifts in TOJ and the slope of the psychometric function in SJ.

Main Results:

• The point of subjective simultaneity (PSS) estimated using the TOJ task was found to shift.
• This shift consistently moved the PSS towards the region of maximal sensitivity identified in the SJ task's synchrony judgment curve.
• Criterion shifts in the TOJ task were directly correlated with regions of higher discriminability in the audio-visual temporal interval.

Conclusions:

• The findings support the hypothesis that TOJ task performance is influenced by the underlying sensitivity to synchrony.
• Criterion settings in TOJ tasks adapt to optimize performance by aligning with the most discriminable temporal intervals.
• This research clarifies the relationship between different psychophysical tasks used to measure audio-visual synchrony perception.