PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Stephanie Badde AU - Pia Ley AU - Siddhart S Rajendran AU - Idris Shareef AU - Ramesh Kekunnaya AU - Brigitte Röder TI - Cross-modal temporal biases emerge during early sensitive periods AID - 10.1101/839514 DP - 2019 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 839514 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/11/13/839514.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/11/13/839514.full AB - Human perception features stable biases, such as perceiving visual events as later than synchronous auditory events. The origin of such perceptual biases is unknown, they could be innate or shaped by sensory experience during a sensitive period. To investigate the role of sensory experience, we tested whether a congenital, transient loss of vision, caused by bilateral dense cataracts, has sustained effects on the ability to order events spatio-temporally within and across sensory modalities. Most strikingly, individuals with reversed congenital cataracts showed a bias towards perceiving visual stimuli as occurring earlier than auditory (Exp. 1) and tactile (Exp. 2) stimuli. In contrast, both normally sighted controls and individuals who could see at birth but developed cataracts during childhood reported the typical bias of perceiving vision as delayed compared to audition. Thus, we provide strong evidence that cross-modal temporal perceptual biases depend on sensory experience and emerge during an early sensitive period.