Auditory-induced visual illusions in rodents measured by spontaneous behavioural response

Abstract

When two brief sounds are presented with a short flash of light, we often perceive that the flash blinks twice. This phenomenon, called the “sound-induced flash illusion”, has been investigated as an example of how humans finely integrate multisensory information, more specifically, the temporal content of perception. However, it is unclear whether nonhuman animals experience the illusion. Therefore, we investigated whether the Mongolian gerbil, a rodent with relatively good eyesight, experiences this illusion. The novel object recognition (NOR) paradigm was used to evaluate the gerbil’s natural (i.e., untrained) capacity for multimodal integration. A light-emitting diode embedded within an object presented time-varying visual stimuli (different flashing patterns). The animals were first familiarised with repetitive single flashes. Then, various sound stimuli were introduced during test trials. An increase in exploration suggested that the animals perceived a flashing pattern differently only when the contradicting sound (double beeps) was presented simultaneously with a single flash. This result shows that the gerbil may experience the sound-induced flash illusion and indicates for the first time that rodents may have the capacity to integrate temporal content of perception in a sophisticated manner as do humans.

What you see is what you hear: Twenty years of research using the Sound-Induced Flash Illusion

“…Very recently, the illusion has also been observed in rodents (Ito et al, 2019), opening up new avenues for translational models of multisensory perception using this paradigm.…”

Bayesian Causal Inference: A Unifying Neuroscience Theory

“…Although not yet quantitatively studied, given that the sound-induced flash illusion has been reported to occur in other species such as rodents 41 , it is likely that BCI also operates in the sensory processing systems of lower mammals.…”