Corrigendum: Action Sounds Modulate Arm Reaching Movements

A corrigendum on: Action Sounds Modulate Arm Reaching Movements by Tajadura-Jiménez, A., Marquardt, T., Swapp, D., Kitagawa, N., and Bianchi-Berthouze, N. (2016). Front. Psychol. 7:1391. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.0139

Affective Multimodal Displays: Acoustic Spectra Modulates Perception of Auditory-Tactile Signals

Presented at the 14th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2008) on June 24-27, 2008 in Paris, France.Emotional events may interrupt ongoing cognitive processes and automatically grab attention, modulating the subsequent perceptual processes. Hence, emotional eliciting stimuli might effectively be used in warning applications, where a fast and accurate response from users is required. In addition, conveying information through an optimum multisensory combination can lead to a further enhancement of user responses. In the present study we investigated the emotional response to sounds differing in their acoustic spectra, and their influence on speeded detection of auditory-somatosensory stimuli. Higher sound frequencies resulted in an increase in emotional arousal. We suggest that emotional processes might be responsible for the different auditory-somatosensory integration patterns observed for low and high frequency sounds. The presented results might have important implications for the design of auditory and multisensory warning interfaces

The Improved Sensitivity to Crossmodal Asynchrony Caused by Voluntary Action: Comparing Combinations of Sensory Modalities

The brain has to assess the fine temporal relationship between voluntary actions and their sensory effects to achieve precise spatiotemporal control of body movement. Recently we found that voluntary action improved the subsequent perceptual temporal discrimination between somatosensory and auditory events. In voluntary condition, participants actively pressed a button and a noise burst was presented at various onset asynchronies relative to the button press. The participants made either ‘sound-first’ or ‘touch-first’ responses. We found that the temporal order judgment performance in the voluntary condition (as indexed by just noticeable difference) was significantly better than that when their finger was passively stimulated (passive condition). Temporal attention and comparable involuntary movement did not explain the improvement caused by the voluntary action. The results suggest that predicting sensory consequences via a ‘forward’ model enhances perceptual temporal resolution for precise control of the body. The present study examined whether this improved temporal sensitivity caused by the voluntary action is also observed for the other combinations of sensory modalities. We compared the effects of voluntary action on the temporal sensitivity between auditory-somatosensory, visual-somatosensory, and somatosensory-somatosensory stimulus pairs

Auditory-Somatosensory Temporal Sensitivity Improves When the Somatosensory Event Is Caused by Voluntary Body Movement

When we actively interact with the environment, it is crucial that we perceive a precise temporal relationship between our own actions and sensory effects to guide our body movements.Thus, we hypothesized that voluntary movements improve perceptual sensitivity to the temporal disparity between auditory and movement-related somatosensory events compared to when they are delivered passively to sensory receptors. In the voluntary condition, participants voluntarily tapped a button, and a noise burst was presented at various onset asynchronies relative to the button press. The participants made either 'sound-first' or 'touch-first' responses. We found that the performance of temporal order judgment (TOJ) in the voluntary condition (as indexed by the just noticeable difference) was significantly better (M=42.5 ms ±3.8 s.e.m) than that when their finger was passively stimulated (passive condition: M=66.8 ms ±6.3 s.e.m). We further examined whether the performance improvement with voluntary action can be attributed to the prediction of the timing of the stimulation from sensory cues (sensory-based prediction), kinesthetic cues contained in voluntary action, and/or to the prediction of stimulation timing from the efference copy of the motor command (motor-based prediction). When the participant’s finger was moved passively to press the button (involuntary condition) and when three noise bursts were presented before the target burst with regular intervals (predictable condition), the TOJ performance was not improved from that in the passive condition. These results suggest that the improvement in sensitivity to temporal disparity between somatosensory and auditory events caused by the voluntary action cannot be attributed to sensory-based prediction and kinesthetic cues. Rather, the prediction from the efference copy of the motor command would be crucial for improving the temporal sensitivity

Sperm depletion in relation to developmental nutrition and genotype in Drosophila melanogaster

Nutrient limitation during development can restrict the ability of adults to invest in costly fitness traits, and genotypes can vary in their sensitivity to developmental nutrition. However, little is known about how genotype and nutrition affect male ability to maintain ejaculate allocation and achieve fertilization across successive matings. Using 17 isogenic lines of Drosophila melanogaster, we investigated how variation in developmental nutrition affects males’ abilities to mate, transfer sperm, and sire offspring when presented with successive virgin females.We found that, with each successive mating, males required longer to initiate copulation, transferred fewer sperm, and sired fewer offspring. Males reared on a low-nutrient diet transferred fewer sperm than those reared on nutritionally superior diets, but the rate at which males depleted their sperm, as well as their reproductive performance, was largely independent of diet. Genotype and the genotype × diet interaction explained little of the variation in these male reproductive traits. Our results show that sperm depletion can occur rapidly and impose substantial fitness costs for D. melanogaster males across multiple genotypes and developmental environments

The pleasant heat? A study of thermal-emotion associations

Sorrento, Mainehttps://digitalmaine.com/dmr_images/5187/thumbnail.jp