The brain constantly has to interpret stimuli from a range of modalities originating from the same or different objects to create unambiguous percepts. The mechanisms of such multisensory processing have been intensely studied with respect to the time window of integration or the effect of spatial separation. However, the neural mechanisms remain elusive with respect to the role of alerting effects and multisensory integration. We addressed this issue by choosing a test paradigm where we could manipulate potentially alerting stimuli and simultaneously activating stimuli independently: We measured the temporal ventriloquism effect in European starlings by using the temporal order judgment paradigm with subjects judging the temporal order of the lighting of 2 spatially separated lights. If spatially noninformative acoustic stimuli were added to the visual stimuli the performance improved when the 2 visual stimuli were flanked by acoustic cues with a small time-offset compared to synchronous presentation. Two acoustic cues presented with asymmetric offsets showed that this effect was mainly driven by the cue trailing the second visual stimulus, while an acoustic cue leading the first visual stimulus had less effect. In contrast, 1 singleton acoustic cue prior to the first visual stimulus, without a second acoustic cue, enhanced performance. Our results support the hypothesis that the first stimulus pair with the leading sound activates alerting mechanisms and enhances neural processing, while the second stimulus pair with the trailing sound drives multisensory integration by simultaneous activation within the temporal binding window. (PsycINFO Database Record

中文翻译：

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欧洲star鸟的时间腹语作用：两个平行加工路径的证据。

大脑必须不断地从源自相同或不同物体的一系列模式中解释刺激，以产生明确的感知。关于集成的时间窗口或空间分离的影响，已经对这种多感觉处理的机制进行了深入研究。但是，神经机制在警报作用和多感官整合方面仍然难以捉摸。我们通过选择一种测试范式解决了这个问题，我们可以在其中操纵潜在的警报刺激并同时独立激活刺激：我们通过使用时间顺序判断范式来测量欧洲star鸟的时间内语语效，该范式由受检者判断2个空间的光照的时间顺序分开的灯。如果将空间非信息性的声音刺激添加到视觉刺激中，则与同步演示相比，当两个视觉刺激位于声音提示旁侧且时间偏移较小时，性能会提高。呈现不对称偏移的两个声音提示表明，这种效果主要是由第二视觉刺激后面的提示驱动的，而领先于第一视觉刺激的声学提示效果则较小。相反，在没有第二个声音提示的情况下，在第一个视觉刺激之前的一个单例声音提示会增强性能。我们的结果支持以下假设：第一个具有领先声音的刺激对可激活警报机制并增强神经处理能力，而带有尾声的第二个刺激对则通过在时间绑定窗口内同时激活来驱动多感官整合。（PsycINFO数据库记录