Memory for Random Time Patterns in Audition, Touch, and Vision

Perception deals with temporal sequences of events, like series of phonemes for audition, dynamic changes in pressure for touch textures, or moving objects for vision. Memory processes are thus needed to make sense of the temporal patterning of sensory information. Recently, we have shown that auditory temporal patterns could be learned rapidly and incidentally with repeated exposure [Kang et al., 2017]. Here, we tested whether rapid incidental learning of temporal patterns was specific to audition, or if it was a more general property of sensory systems. We used a same behavioral task in three modalities: audition, touch, and vision, for stimuli having identical temporal statistics. Participants were presented with sequences of acoustic pulses for audition, motion pulses to the fingertips for touch, or light pulses for vision. Pulses were randomly and irregularly spaced, with all inter-pulse intervals in the sub-second range and all constrained to be longer than the temporal acuity in any modality. This led to pulse sequences with an average inter-pulse interval of 166 ms, a minimum inter-pulse interval of 60 ms, and a total duration of 1.2 s. Results showed that, if a random temporal pattern re-occurred at random times during an experimental block, it was rapidly learned, whatever the sensory modality. Moreover, patterns first learned in the auditory modality displayed transfer of learning to either touch or vision. This suggests that sensory systems may be exquisitely tuned to incidentally learn re-occurring temporal patterns, with possible cross-talk between the senses.