Abstract
Relative to audition, vision is considered much less trustworthy in sensorimotor timing such as synchronizing finger movements with a temporally regular sequence. Visuomotor timing requires maintaining attention over time, whereas the sustained visual attention may not be well held in conventional visuomotor timing task settings where flashing visual stimuli consisted of a briefly presented flash and a long blank period. In the present study, the potential attentional lapses in time due to the disappearance of the flash were carefully controlled in Experiment 1 by changing the color of the flash instead of its disappearance, or in Experiment 2 by adding an additional continuously presented fixation point serving as an external attentional cue when the flash disappeared. Improvement of visuomotor timing performance was found in both experiments. The finding suggests a role of enhanced sustained visual attention in improving visuomotor timing, by which vision could also be a trustworthy modality for processing temporal information in sensorimotor interactions.
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The data generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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The codes used during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Guangdong Provincial Key Research and Development Program (2019B010152001) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31971033). The study was performed via the research platform of **ang Wu’s lab, we thank the lab members who have contributed to establishing the platform: Liang Zhou, Lingyu Gan, Cheng Qian, Feiyi Ouyang, Junkai Yang, and Li Gu.
Funding
This work was supported by Guangdong Provincial Key Research and Development Program (2019B010152001) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (31971033).
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YH: methodology, software, investigation, formal analysis. SZ: methodology, software, investigation, formal analysis, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing. LZ: software, formal analysis, writing—review and editing. MS: software, investigation. XW: conceptualization, methodology, software, formal analysis, writing—original draft, writing—review and editing, supervision, funding acquisition.
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The research protocols in this study were approved by the Institutional Review Board of Psychology Department of Sun Yat-Sen University. The research protocols mostly followed the tenets of the Declaration of Helsinki, with confidentiality and privacy of the collected data protected by the Institutional Review Board of Psychology Department of Sun Yat-Sen University.
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Huang, Y., Zhong, S., Zhan, L. et al. Sustained visual attention improves visuomotor timing. Psychological Research 86, 2059–2066 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-021-01629-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-021-01629-9