Multisensory perception and decision-making with a new sensory skill.

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Science
• Human Perception

Background:

• Humans can acquire novel sensory skills, mapping new inputs to world states.
• The flexibility of integrating new sensory skills into multisensory perception and decision-making remains largely unexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how flexibly new sensory skills embed within multisensory perception and decision-making.
• To test for efficient multisensory perception and decision-making markers using a novel auditory cue for distance perception.

Main Methods:

• Trained typically sighted participants (N=12) to use an auditory cue for distance in a virtual environment alongside a visual cue.
• Employed model-based analyses to assess multisensory integration and decision-making efficiency.
• Assessed decision speed, interference from concurrent tasks, and Bayes-like integration with visual information.

Main Results:

• 12 out of 14 participants successfully learned to use the novel auditory cue for distance judgment.
• The new sensory skill enhanced decision speed and showed resilience to interference from a digit span task.
• Auditory cues integrated with vision in a Bayes-like manner, improving perceptual precision, though benefits were sub-optimal and lacked forced signal fusion.

Conclusions:

• Individuals can embed new sensory skills into flexible multisensory perception and decision-making after brief training.
• Learned sensory skills enhance perceptual abilities, with implications for developing sensory augmentation systems.
• Identified limitations (sub-optimality, lack of fusion) provide avenues for future research on the boundaries and neural basis of these abilities.