Auditorily Paced Keytapping Performance during Synchronous, Decreased, and Delayed Visual Feedback

Abstract

20 young adult female Ss tapped on a tapping key to low, mid, and high sensation-level pure-tone auditory-pacing stimuli while being exposed to synchronous visual-feedback, delayed visual-feedback, and decreased sensory-feedback conditions. The stroboscopic visual-feedback stimulus was judged to be as bright as the mid-sensation-level auditory stimulus was loud in a preliminary cross-modality matching study. The dependent variables evaluated were tapping error, temporal deviation of the taps from the onset of the pacing stimuli, and tap duration. Few tapping errors occurred under any of the conditions which indicated that the auditory sensory modality is effective in regulating motor performance even when temporally distorted visual feedback is associated with the performance. Tapping deviation data strongly suggested that the relative perceptual magnitudes between the auditory pacing stimuli and the delayed visual-feedback stimulus are important factors in determining the speed of motor response. Tap durations were greater during decreased sensory-feedback and delayed visual-feedback conditions than during synchronous visual-feedback conditions, and it was speculated that these changes occurred due to an increase in tactual and kinesthetic feedback employed by Ss to counterbalance the distorted and decreased sensory feedbacks.