Combining temporal cues for the synchronisation of motor actions

When making accurately timed actions, we rely on sensory events in the surrounding environment to synchronise our movements. Often these cues can be complex in their nature – an event can be perceived across multiple modalities (e.g. sound, vision, touch) or occur within a single modality but be defined by different sensory properties within that modality (e.g. sound at different pitch or visual colour and depth information). The central nervous system (CNS) must therefore determine which signals are relevant and moreover, which are most reliable in order to optimally estimate the true temporal onsets of the events and subsequently produce synchronised motor actions.

In this talk, I will discuss our research into how the CNS combines multiple sources of sensory information when we synchronise our movements to temporal events. I will present results from our recent experiments using a paradigm requiring participants to make movements in time to a metronome. We have developed novel methods to present multiple metronomic cues across different sensory modalities and thus investigated if and how participants integrated these cues in order to synchronise to the ‘beat’. We have subsequently developed models that show the integration is statistically optimal and can be described using a Bayesian framework. The talk will further discuss the effects of ageing on multisensory integration and briefly introduce our new research investigating synchronisation of movements within groups of individuals.