As a stereo odor cue, internostril odor influx could help us in many spatial tasks, including localization and navigation. Studies have also revealed that this benefit could be modulated by the asymmetric concentrations of both influxes (left nose vs right nose). The interaction between olfaction and vision, such as in object recognition and visual direction judgment, has been documented; however, little has been revealed about the impact of odor cues on sound localization. Here we adopted the ventriloquist paradigm in auditory–odor interactions and investigated sound localization with the concurrent unilateral odor influx. Specifically, we teased apart both the “nature” of the odors (pure olfactory stimulus vs. mixed olfactory/trigeminal stimulus) and the location of influx (left nose vs. right nose) and examined sound localization with the method of constant stimuli. Forty-one participants, who passed the Chinese Smell Identification Test, perceived sounds with different azimuths (0°, 5°, 10°, and 20° unilaterally deflected from the sagittal plane by head-related transfer function) and performed sound localization (leftward or rightward) tasks under concurrent, different unilateral odor influxes (10% v/v phenylethyl alcohol, PEA, as pure olfactory stimulus, 1% m/v menthol as mixed olfactory/trigeminal stimulus, and propylene glycol as the control). Meanwhile, they reported confidence levels of the judgments. Results suggested that unilateral PEA influx did not affect human sound localization judgments. However, unilateral menthol influx systematically biased the perceived sound localization, shifting toward the odor source. Our study provides evidence that unilateral odor influx could bias perceived sound localization only when the odor activates the trigeminal nerves.

The perceived position of a moving object in vision entails an accumulation of neural signals over space and time. Due to neural signal transmission delays, the visual system can not acquire immediate information about the moving object's position. Although physiological and psychophysical studies on the flash-lag effect (FLE), a moving object is perceived ahead of a flash even they are aligned at the same location, have shown that the visual system develops the mechanisms of predicting the object's location to compensate for the neural delays, the neural mechanisms of motion-induced location prediction are not still understood well. Here, we investigated the role of neural activity changes in areas MT+ (specialized for motion processing) and the potential contralateral processing preference of MT+ in modulating the FLE. Using transcranial direct current stimulations (tDCS) over the left and right MT+ between pre-and post-tests of the FLE in different motion directions, we measured the effects of tDCS on the FLE. The results found that anodal and cathodal tDCS enhanced and reduced the FLE with the moving object heading to but not deviating from the side of the brain stimulated, respectively, compared to sham tDCS. These findings suggest a causal role of area MT+ in motion-induced location prediction, which may involve the integration of position information.