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Effect before cause: supramodal recalibration of sensorimotor timing

Yes / Our motor actions normally generate sensory events, but how do we know which events were self generated
and which have external causes? Here we use temporal adaptation to investigate the processing stage and generality of our
sensorimotor timing estimates.
Methodology/Principal Findings: Adaptation to artificially-induced delays between action and event can produce a
startling percept¿upon removal of the delay it feels as if the sensory event precedes its causative action. This temporal
recalibration of action and event occurs in a quantitatively similar manner across the sensory modalities. Critically, it is
robust to the replacement of one sense during the adaptation phase with another sense during the test judgment.
Conclusions/Significance: Our findings suggest a high-level, supramodal recalibration mechanism. The effects are well
described by a simple model which attempts to preserve the expected synchrony between action and event, but only when
causality indicates it is reasonable to do so. We further demonstrate that this model successfully characterises related
adaptation data from outside the sensorimotor domain.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/17101
Date January 2009
CreatorsHeron, James, Hanson, James Vincent Michael, Whitaker, David J.
Source SetsBradford Scholars
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeArticle, Published version
Rights© 2009 Heron, J., et al. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/uk)., CC-BY-NC-ND

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