October 2008
in
Psychological Science
To investigate the extent that multisensory integration effects include a bidirectional interplay between the brain and the peripheral nervous system.
5 healthy young adults underwent a series of 5 different sensory experiments using different combinations of tactile, auditory and visual stimulations at varying threshold and suprathreshold levels. Peripheral nervous system responses were measured via electromyography activity.
Overall the results clearly demonstrated that signals in the peripheral nervous system can be modulated by cross-modal interaction at the central level. These findings suggest that cross modal sensory processing occurs at both the physics and biological levels, and that the activity of neurons can be modulated via physical interactions.
To investigate auditory noise can enhance the sensitivity of tactile, visual and proprioceptive system responses to weak sensory signals.
A series of different sensory modality experiments used various thresholds of auditory noise to test participants visual, tactile, and proprioceptive sensory responses and performance.
Results demonstrated that crossmodal stochastic resonance is a ubiquitous phenomenon in humans that can modulate multisensory neurons. The effect is an integrated activation that promotes sensitivity transitions and improves the perception of signals across multiple types of senses.
Phonons provide insights to the behavior of muscle contractions.
To investigate several physical concepts that could help us better many different biological systems in novel ways.
The influence of photons, phonons, lasers, microtubules, electronic crystals, Bloch waves, neuronic crystals and phononic crystals on the behavior of biological systems was explored. An experiment tasked participants with isometric calf contractions over 10 trials, with muscular activity measured via EMGA electrodes.
Specifically it was found that phonons can help understand isometric muscle contractions. The researchers present the case that many such types of physical phenomena could potentially reveal new understandings of complex biological systems.
The fulcrum principle could be modelled as an asymetric, anharmonic oscillator.
To investigate the the mechanisms behind the fulcrum principle via a combination of different experiments.
15 different experiments leveraging the fulcrum principle examined the effects of varying thresholds of deterministic and stochastic sensory stimulation via visual, motor tactile, auditory, and proprioceptive modalities.
The results found the fulcrum principle could be modelled as an asymetric, anharmonic oscillator, and that muscular responses can be well described by Debye's theory of phonons or mechanical oscillation modes.
Sensory processing can be consistently enhanced via different forms of stimulation of multiple sensory modalities.
To investigate the characteristics of multisensory integration with both stochastic and deterministic forms of sensory stimulation.
Study participants underwent a series of 9 sensory experiments using different combinations of visual, auditory, tactile and electromyography stimulation to examine multisensory integration responses.
Results provided clear evidence of the Fulcrum principle, showing enhanced cross-modal multisensory perception responses across a varied forms of sensory stimulation. Overall the energy transfer necessary for optimally modulating neuronal firings was found to be approximately constant across all forms of stimuli, for both stochastic and deterministic input signals. The findings provide a framework for enhancing human performance in highly accessible ways, and may lead to a better understanding of conditions such as autism and ADHD.
Optimized tactile noise significantly increases visual perception thresholds of weak signals.
To investigate if multisensory integration effects can transition between tactile noise and vision to increase perceptual sensitivity to weak signals typically difficult to detect.
7 healthy young adults received up to 1kHz of tactile noise stimulation via a piezoelectric sensor. Participants were also tasked with detecting characteristics of sinusoidal gratings with varying luminance modulation using a staircase procedure.
Results revealed that the visual threshold profiles of the participants varied as a function of the different tactile noise levels demonstrating a typical U-inverse function. With optimal noise visual perception of weak signals was significantly increased. The researchers concluded that the results strongly support the notion that the Fulcrum principle is a fundamental physical principle that underlies all sensory processing.
Effective tactile noise significantly increase visual perception sensitivity of weak signals.
To investigate if psychophysical techniques with tactile noise can enhance the sensitivity of visual system responses to weak signals.
The multisensory FULCRUM principle methodology was applied with participants using effective tactile noise. Visual luminance modulated tests were conducted to examine changes in the response effects on visual perception to weak signals.
Results demonstrated that effective tactile noise significantly decreased luminance modulated visual thresholds, triggering a multisensory facilitation with increased visual perception sensitivity.
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