Early, but not late visual distractors affect movement synchronization to a temporal-spatial visual cue

• Main Authors: Ashley J Booth, Mark T Elliott
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2015-06-01
• Series: Frontiers in Psychology
• Subjects: sensorimotor synchronization; visual cues; movement timing; Distractor Cues; visiomotor
• Online Access: http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00866/full

The ease of synchronising movements to a rhythmic cue is dependent on the modality of the cue presentation: timing accuracy is much higher when synchronising with discrete auditory rhythms than an equivalent visual stimulus presented through flashes. However, timing accuracy is improved if the visual cue presents spatial as well as temporal information (e.g. a dot following an oscillatory trajectory). Similarly, when synchronising with an auditory target metronome in the presence of a second visual distracting metronome, the distraction is stronger when the visual cue contains spatial-temporal information rather than temporal only. The present study investigates individuals’ ability to synchronise movements to a temporal-spatial visual cue in the presence of same-modality temporal-spatial distractors. Moreover, we investigated how increasing the number of distractor stimuli impacted on maintaining synchrony with the target cue. Participants made oscillatory vertical arm movements in time with a vertically oscillating white target dot centred on a large projection screen. The target dot was surrounded by 2, 8 or 14 distractor dots, which had an identical trajectory to the target but at a phase lead or lag of 0, 100 or 200ms. We found participants’ timing performance was only affected in the phase-lead conditions and when there were large numbers of distractors present (8 and 14). This asymmetry suggests participants still rely on salient events in the stimulus trajectory to synchronise movements. Subsequently, distractions occurring in the window of attention surrounding those events have the maximum impact on timing performance.