True and Perceived Synchrony are Preferentially Associated With Particular Sensory Pairings

Perception and behavior are fundamentally shaped by the integration of different sensory modalities into unique multisensory representations, a process governed by spatio-temporal correspondence. Prior work has characterized temporal perception using the point in time at which subjects are most likely to judge multisensory stimuli to be simultaneous (PSS) and the temporal binding window (TBW) over which participants are likely to do so. Here we examine the relationship between the PSS and the TBW within and between individuals, and within and between three sensory combinations: audiovisual, audiotactile and visuotactile. We demonstrate that TBWs correlate within individuals and across multisensory pairings, but PSSs do not. Further, we reveal that while the audiotactile and audiovisual pairings show tightly related TBWs, they also exhibit a differential relationship with respect to true and perceived multisensory synchrony. Thus, audiotactile and audiovisual temporal processing share mechanistic features yet are respectively functionally linked to objective and subjective synchrony.