Effects Of Selective Attention And Multisensory Integration On Self-motion Perception

The perception of self-motion is crucial for navigation,spatial orientation,and motor control.Visual and vestibular information can be used to judge heading,but each modality alone is often insufficient for accurate performance.The brain needs to determine which signals in the explosive sensory information emanate from a common source by selective attention and integrates them based on co-occurring in time and space.Many researches have shown that vestibular-visual multisensory cues facilitate the perception of self-motion.But it remains unclear that whether and how selective attention can affect the self-motion perception when it was signaled by single modality(vestibular or visual)and dual modality(vestibular and visual).We investigated different effects of selective attention and multisensory integration on self-motion perception by adding an independent distractor when self-motion was signaled by vestibular,visual,or combined vestibular-visual signals.The distractors included visual and auditory distractors with motion information,and complex cognitive distractor.The object-based attention induced by visual distractor significantly affected the motion perception.The visual moving dots induced significant biases in perceived heading when self-motion was signaled by either visual or vestibular cue alone.However,these biases were greatly reduced when visual and vestibular cues together signaled self-motion.A congruent motion direction could reduce heading thresholds and improve sensitivity.The complex cognitive distractor induced biases but did not affect the precision in perceived heading.No significant effects on both of the accuracy and precision were found in the condition of auditory distractor.In addition,multisensory heading discrimination thresholds measured in the presence of distractors were generally consistent with the predictions of an optimal cue integration strategy.These findings will contribute to figure out the mechanism by which selective attention and multisensory integration modulate the self-motion perception.