Temporal context shapes multicue integration in auditory time-to-contact judgments.

Area of Science:

• Auditory perception
• Cognitive neuroscience
• Human sensory processing

Background:

• Predicting arrival times is crucial for action.
• Visual time-to-contact (TTC) uses integrated motion and duration cues.
• Auditory TTC computations remain less understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• Investigate auditory time-to-contact (TTC) judgment.
• Examine cue integration and temporal context effects.
• Determine if audition uses reliability-weighted cue integration.

Main Methods:

• Listeners judged TTC for moving sounds.
• Tested motion-only, duration-only, and combined cues.
• Manipulated fast and slow temporal contexts.
• Applied hierarchical modeling and regression-to-the-mean.

Main Results:

• Combined cues improved precision across conditions.
• Temporal context significantly altered response bias.
• Fast temporal contexts induced delays; slow contexts reduced errors.
• Context-dependent priors strongly influenced judgments.

Conclusions:

• Auditory TTC is an adaptive inference, not fixed.
• Temporal context and priors shape auditory predictive timing.
• Suggests a modality-specific route for auditory predictive timing.