Temporal order judgment of multisensory stimuli in rat and human

Fatemeh Mafi; Matthew F Tang; Mohammad Reza Afarinesh; Sadegh Ghasemian; Vahid Sheibani; Ehsan Arabzadeh

doi:10.3389/fnbeh.2022.1070452

Temporal order judgment of multisensory stimuli in rat and human

Front Behav Neurosci. 2023 Jan 12:16:1070452. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2022.1070452. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Fatemeh Mafi^{1

2}, Matthew F Tang³, Mohammad Reza Afarinesh^{1

2}, Sadegh Ghasemian^{1

2}, Vahid Sheibani^{1

2}, Ehsan Arabzadeh^{1

2

3}

Affiliations

¹ Neuroscience Research Center, Institute of Neuropharmacology, Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Kerman, Iran.
² Cognitive Neuroscience Research Center, Institute of Neuropharmacology, Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Kerman, Iran.
³ Eccles Institute of Neuroscience, John Curtin School of Medical Research, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia.

Abstract

We do not fully understand the resolution at which temporal information is processed by different species. Here we employed a temporal order judgment (TOJ) task in rats and humans to test the temporal precision with which these species can detect the order of presentation of simple stimuli across two modalities of vision and audition. Both species reported the order of audiovisual stimuli when they were presented from a central location at a range of stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA)s. While both species could reliably distinguish the temporal order of stimuli based on their sensory content (i.e., the modality label), rats outperformed humans at short SOAs (less than 100 ms) whereas humans outperformed rats at long SOAs (greater than 100 ms). Moreover, rats produced faster responses compared to humans. The reaction time data further revealed key differences in decision process across the two species: at longer SOAs, reaction times increased in rats but decreased in humans. Finally, drift-diffusion modeling allowed us to isolate the contribution of various parameters including evidence accumulation rates, lapse and bias to the sensory decision. Consistent with the psychophysical findings, the model revealed higher temporal sensitivity and a higher lapse rate in rats compared to humans. These findings suggest that these species applied different strategies for making perceptual decisions in the context of a multimodal TOJ task.

Keywords: audiovisual; speed-accuracy; temporal order judgment; temporal precision; temporal sensitivity.

Grants and funding

This research was supported by funding from Kerman University of Medical Sciences (grant no. 97000751) and the Cognitive Sciences and Technologies Council of Iran.