11/14/25 Adam Tiesman: Behavioral mechanisms underlying the integration of auditory and visual motion
Neuroscience brown bag
Adam Tiesman
Graduate Student
Date: Friday, November 14, 2025
Time: 1:25- 2:15pm
Location: 316 Wilson Hall
Behavioral mechanisms underlying the integration of auditory and visual motion
Accurate motion perception is crucial for navigating complex environments, where sensory information is often derived from multiple modalities. While multisensory cues improve performance in tasks involving stationary stimuli, the perception of multisensory motion remains unclear. Here, we investigated whether motion cue integration occurs and whether audiovisual motion perception is modulated by attention, trial history, and stimulus statistics. Forty-eight adults performed left–right direction discriminations with auditory (A), visual (V), and audiovisual (AV) motion, with attention cued to A, V, or AV. Visual estimates were more reliable than auditory (smaller variance), and AV performance exceeded either modality alone. A reliability-weighted maximum-likelihood model closely predicted AV thresholds for congruent cues, indicating near-optimal integration. Under cue conflict, AV judgments were dominated by vision. A follow-up experiment using congruence discrimination points to causal inference as a main driver of cross-modal and individual variability in conflict trials. Additionally, analyses of prior responses (serial dependence) revealed measurable trial-history effects that shifted directional judgments in a modality-specific manner. Together, our results point to key differences and similarities in the mechanisms of auditory and visual motion perception, both shaped by attention and prior history.