Reciprocal Interference Between Audition and Touch in the Perception of Duration.

Audition and touch interact with one another and share a number of similarities; however, little is known about their interplay in the perception of temporal duration. The present study intended to investigate whether the temporal duration of an irrelevant auditory or tactile stimulus could modulate the perceived duration of a target stimulus presented in the other modality (i.e., tactile or auditory) adopting both a between-participants (Experiment 1) and a within-participants (Experiment 2) experimental design. In a two-alternative forced-choice task, participants decided which of two events in a target modality was longer. The simultaneously distractor stimuli were presented with a duration that was either congruent or incongruent to the target's. Results showed that both the auditory and tactile modalities affected duration judgments in the incongruent condition, decreasing performance in both experiments. Moreover, in Experiment 1, the tactile modality enhanced the perception of auditory stimuli in the congruent condition, but audition did not facilitate performance for the congruent condition in the tactile modality; this tactile enhancement of audition was not found in Experiment 2. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study documenting audiotactile interactions in the perception of duration, and suggests that audition and touch might modulate one another in a more balanced manner, in contrast to audiovisual pairings. The findings support previous evidence as to the shared links and reciprocal influences when audition and touch interact with one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]