Contrasting Dependent Variables in the Study of Multisensory Integration

Multisensory integration is the process by which the brain synthesizes sensory signals across multiple modalities to form a product that is distinct from its component signals. There is a vast and growing corpus of findings documenting the benefits of multisensory integration in a wide variety of circumstances and species, including cue detection, localization, and object identification. These benefits represent enhancements of information processing beyond what is possible by the independent operation of the senses. There is substantial interest in the development and evaluation of sensitive quantitative measures of multisensory integration in order to provide the greatest opportunity to compare its efficacy across different conditions and disorders. Crucially, most human studies seeking to quantify defects in multisensory integration have used reaction time and not response accuracy as the measure of the response. While there is no theoretical limitation on collecting both measures in the context of an experiment, studies using reaction time and response accuracy often have a subtle but important differences in research design. There have not been any studies that simultaneously compare the effect sizes of multisensory integration measured by these two different metrics. My central hypothesis is that accuracy is a superior variable compared to reaction time in measuring multisensory integration. If correct, this would suggest a different probe should be used to assess multisensory integration in clinical populations.

Grantor dc:publisher

Wake Forest University

Year dc:date.issued

2018

Author dc:creator

• Carrasquillo, Rachel Anne

• Accuracy

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/90758

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:wakespace.lib.wfu.edu:10339/90758