Jamilla Pitts
Summer Research Description: In order to perceive the world in an accurate and meaningful way, the brain must have the ability to distinguish whether stimuli from different modalities come from one source. The brain’s ability to bind auditory and visual stimuli crucially depends on the temporal structure of this information. Prior studies have used training paradigms that arbitrarily apply stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) regardless of an individual’s initial temporal window size to investigate the plasticity of these binding windows. This present study investigates the malleability of the temporal window of multisensory binding using adaptive training; if the temporal binding window can be narrowed, this will allow more accurate and meaningful perceptions of the world. An adaptive training paradigm was used in which participants underwent a two-alternative-forced choice (2-AFC) audiovisual simultaneity judgment task with feedback. SOAs were used throughout the training trials at different levels based on the individual’s initial pre-training judgment assessment. If the adaptive training administered in this study is indeed better than previous administered trainings, we hypothesize that there will be narrower binding windows after training.