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Multisensory integration in the estimation of relative path length

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Abstract

One of the fundamental requirements for successful navigation through an environment is the continuous monitoring of distance travelled. To do so, humans normally use one or a combination of visual, proprioceptive/efferent, vestibular, and temporal cues. In the real world, information from one sensory modality is normally congruent with information from other modalities; hence, studying the nature of sensory interactions is often difficult. In order to decouple the natural covariation between different sensory cues, we used virtual reality technology to vary the relation between the information generated from visual sources and the information generated from proprioceptive/efferent sources. When we manipulated the stimuli such that the visual information was coupled in various ways to the proprioceptive/efferent information, human subjects predominantly used visual information to estimate the ratio of two traversed path lengths. Although proprioceptive/efferent information was not used directly, the mere availability of proprioceptive information increased the accuracy of relative path length estimation based on visual cues, even though the proprioceptive/efferent information was inconsistent with the visual information. These results convincingly demonstrated that active movement (locomotion) facilitates visual perception of path length travelled.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Drs. D. Maurer, R. Racine, L. Allan, and C. Ellard for helpful discussions and comments on the manuscript and N. Jones, K. Strode, and D. Zelek for their assistance in collecting data. We would also like to thank Dr. B. Frost, G. Barrett, and R. Dupras for discussions and assistance in the initial design and construction of the VR interface and software. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on the earlier versions of this article. This work was supported by grants from the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation to H.-J.S.

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  1. Department of Psychology, McMaster University, 1280 Main Street West, Hamilton, Ontario, L8S 4K1, Canada

    Hong-Jin Sun, Jennifer L. Campos & George S. W. Chan

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  1. Hong-Jin Sun
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  2. Jennifer L. Campos
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  3. George S. W. Chan
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Correspondence to Hong-Jin Sun.

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Sun, HJ., Campos, J.L. & Chan, G.S.W. Multisensory integration in the estimation of relative path length. Exp Brain Res 154, 246–254 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-003-1652-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-003-1652-9

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