Can simultaneity across senses be recalibrated?

Main aim: The proposed M2 internship (6 months) will pursue a series of psychophysics studies investigating how an individual’s temporal order bias interacts with temporal plasticity. Background: The brain integrates information coming from different sensory modalities in a unified percept: seeing a face pronouncing the syllable “ka” dubbed with the sound “pa” yields a distinct multisensory percept “ta”(McGurk and MacDonald, 1976; van Wassenhove et al., 2005). For this to happen, sensory signals need to be considered as temporally oincident or “simultaneous” by the brain. Multisensory neurons have permissible windows of integration up to 1500 ms (Stein & Meredith, 1993) and some multisensory cell populations show response profiles that converge on optimal response enhancements at ∼100–200 ms of asynchrony (Meredith, Nemitz, & Stein, 1987). These time constants are reflected in behavior for speech (van Wassenhove et al., 2007) and in the plasticity of audiovisual simultaneity simpler stimuli (Fujisaki et al., 2004). The timing of audiovisual events is also well captured by the phase of neural oscillations (Kösem et al., 2014; Grabot et al., 2017; Lennert et al., 2021; Chalas et al., 2023). In this internship, we will explore the recent observation that individuals display idiosyncratic point of subjective simultaneity (Grabot and van Wassenhove, 2017), namely each individual requires a different auditory-visual delay between events to judge them as being simultaneous. In this study, we will test the implication of idiosyncratic temporal order bias for the classic recalibration phenomenon (Fujisaki et al., 2004; Van der Burg et al., 2015; Recio et al., 2019). What is expected of the intern: - Excellent organizational skills - Programming and piloting psychophysics experiments - Orientation to details - Planning and conducting experimental psychology experiments - Data analyses (psychometric curve fitting, statistical analyses in R or equivalent) - Writing up results in English Keywords: time perception, temporal order, multisensory research Methods: psychophysics, statistics Requirements: - Background knowledge in psychology, cognitive science or neuroscience - Background knowledge in experimental psychology and the setting up of a psychophysics experiment - Programming experience in Matlab and PsychToolbox (or equivalent in Python) - Sufficient English ability for scientific reading, writing and oral communication - (Plus) Knowledge in computational modeling - (Plus) Experience with EEG or MEG studies References: Chalas N, Omigie D, Poeppel D, van Wassenhove V (2023) Hierarchically nested networks optimize the analysis of audiovisual speech. iScience 26:106257. Fujisaki W, Shimojo S, Kashino M, Nishida S (2004) Recalibration of audiovisual simultaneity. Nat Neurosci 7:773–778. Grabot L, Kösem A, Azizi L, Van Wassenhove V (2017) Prestimulus alpha oscillations and the temporal sequencing of audiovisual events. J Cogn Neurosci 29:1566–1582. Grabot L, van Wassenhove V (2017) Time order as psychological bias. Psychol Sci 28:670–678. Kösem A, Gramfort A, van Wassenhove V (2014) Encoding of event timing in the phase of neural oscillations. Neuroimage 92:274–284. Lennert T, Samiee S, Baillet S (2021) Coupled oscillations enable rapid temporal recalibration to audiovisual asynchrony. Commun Biol 4:1–12. McGurk H, MacDonald J (1976) Hearing lips and seeing voices. Nature 264:746–748. Recio RS, Cravo AM, de Camargo RY, van Wassenhove V (2019) Dissociating the sequential dependency of subjective temporal order from subjective simultaneity. Plos One 14:e0223184. Van der Burg E, Alais D, Cass J (2015) Audiovisual temporal recalibration occurs independently at two different time scales. Sci Rep 5:14526. van Wassenhove V, Grant KW, Poeppel D (2005) Visual speech speeds up the neural processing of auditory speech. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 102:1181–1186. van Wassenhove V, Grant KW, Poeppel D (2007) Temporal window of integration in auditoryvisual speech perception. Neuropsychologia 45:598–607. Please https://brainthemind.files.wordpress.com/2023/07/2023-24_vanwassenhove_recalibration_m2.pdf