PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Shir Shalom-Sperber
AU  - Aihua Chen
AU  - Adam Zaidel
TI  - Rapid cross-sensory adaptation of self-motion perception
AID  - 10.1101/2021.06.16.448688
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2021.06.16.448688
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/06/17/2021.06.16.448688.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/06/17/2021.06.16.448688.full
AB  - Perceptual adaptation is often studied within a single sense. However, our experience of the world is naturally multisensory. Here, we investigated cross-sensory (visual-vestibular) adaptation of self-motion perception. It was previously found that relatively long visual self-motion stimuli (≳ 15s) are required to adapt subsequent vestibular perception, and that shorter duration stimuli do not elicit cross-sensory (visual↔vestibular) adaptation. However, it is not known whether several discrete short-duration stimuli may lead to cross-sensory adaptation (even when their sum, if presented together, would be too short to elicit cross-sensory adaptation). This would suggest that the brain monitors and adapts to supra-modal statistics of events in the environment. Here we investigated whether cross-sensory (visual↔vestibular) adaptation occurs after experiencing several short (1s) self-motion stimuli. Forty-five participants discriminated the headings of a series of self-motion stimuli. To expose adaptation effects, the trials were grouped in 140 batches, each comprising three ‘prior’ trials, with headings biased to the right or left, followed by a single unbiased ‘test’ trial. Right, and left-biased batches were interleaved pseudo-randomly. We found significant adaptation in both cross-sensory conditions (visual prior and vestibular test trials, and vice versa), as well as both unisensory conditions (when prior and test trials were of the same modality – either visual or vestibular). Fitting the data with a logistic regression model revealed that adaptation was elicited by the prior stimuli (not prior choices). These results suggest that the brain monitors supra-modal statistics of events in the environment, even for short-duration stimuli, leading to functional (supra-modal) adaptation of perception.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.