Seeing what you hear: sound intensity alters rat visual perception in a temporal frequency classification task

Abstract

While integration of multimodal sensory stimuli in cortical hierarchies is well studied, the functional impact of hetero-modal inputs on visual perception is less explored. Here we use a visual classification task in rats to investigate how task-irrelevant sounds modify visual processing. Sound intensity, but not temporal congruency with visual stimuli, effectively compresses the task's visual perceptual space, suggesting inhibition as a mediator of auditory-visual interactions in neural representations.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.