Optimal Audiovisual Integration in People with One Eye

• Published in: Multisensory research Vol. 27; no. 3-4; pp. 173 - 188
• Main Authors: Moro, Stefania S, Harris, Laurence R, Steeves, Jennifer K. E
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Netherlands Brill 01.01.2014
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation - methods; Adult; Auditory Perception - physiology; Eye Enucleation; Female; Humans; Infant; Male; Models, Biological; Photic Stimulation - methods; Reaction Time - physiology; Retinal Neoplasms - surgery; Retinoblastoma - surgery; Sound Localization - physiology; Space Perception - physiology; Vision, Binocular - physiology; Vision, Monocular - physiology
• ISSN: 2213-4794; 2213-4808; 2213-4794
• DOI: 10.1163/22134808-00002453

People with one eye show altered sensory processing. Such changes might reflect a central re-weighting of sensory information that might impact on how multisensory cues are integrated. We assessed whether people who lost an eye early in life differ from controls with respect to audiovisual integration. In order to quantify the relative weightings assigned to each sensory system, participants were asked to spatially localize audiovisual events that have been previously shown to be optimally combined and perceptually fused from the point of view of location in a normal population, where the auditory and visual components were spatially disparate. There was no difference in the variability of localizing unimodal visual and auditory targets by people with one eye compared to controls. People with one eye did however, demonstrate slower reaction times to localize visual stimuli compared to auditory stimuli and were slower than binocular and eye-patched control groups. When localizing bimodal targets, the weightings assigned to each sensory modality in both people with one eye and controls were predictable from their unimodal performance, in accordance with Maximum Likelihood Estimation and the time it took all three groups to localize the bimodal targets was faster than for vision alone. Regardless of demonstrating a longer response time to visual stimuli, people with one eye appear to integrate the auditory and visual components of multisensory events optimally when determining spatial location.