Spatiotemporal biases in manual interception: effects of visual and auditory information processing

This thesis assesses interrelations between spatial and temporal processing by investigating early psychophysical phenomena and implementing new empirical approaches on spatiotemporal processing in the context of movements. It consequently provides new perspectives to current theoretical debates on spatiotemporal processing. The processing of space and time is prone to distortions. For example, spatial length and temporal duration can impact the perception of each other (reciprocally). Longer lines are perceived to be presented for longer temporal intervals and (potentially) vice versa. Here it is argued that such spatiotemporal interrelations depend on the type of sensory input (e.g., visual or auditory), because the precision of spatial and temporal representations differs between sensory modalities. In summary, this thesis shows that i) spatiotemporal biases can transfer from perceptual judgements to motoric responses (i.e., interception and eye movements), that ii) the type of sensory input impacts these interrelations, and that iii) this effect of sensory modality might derive from differences in the acuity of the signal (and consequently representational noise). Thereby, the results indicate that seemingly contradictory theoretical predictions and related empirical findings might be explained by the involved sensory modalities, shed light on the potential impact of spatiotemporal biases on everyday tasks and add towards the debate on the perception-action dissociation, and more concretely on the discussions about visual illusions transferring to action