Dissociable changes in temporal precision and causal expectations following perceptual training

Three experiments investigated the effects of perceptual training on children with ADHD and typically developing children. Experiment 1 found that children with ADHD were more susceptible to the sound-induced flash illusion, while typically developing children were not. Experiment 2 revealed that children with ADHD showed flatter temporal tuning of the illusion compared to their peers.

However, traditional measures of temporal binding window could not differentiate between the two groups, as behavior alone was insufficient to pinpoint the differences. After six days of training involving simultaneous judgment tasks, both groups demonstrated comparable reductions in susceptibility to the illusion. Nevertheless, a more detailed two-dimensional Bayesian causal inference model uncovered distinct latent changes in each group's thinking processes.

Typically developing children adjusted their expectations that auditory and visual signals shared a common cause, while children with ADHD did not recalibrate their prior beliefs in this manner. Instead, those with ADHD showed a marked decrease in temporal uncertainty, indicating more precise perceptual evidence that did not translate to a slower, more abstract estimate of how the environment works causally.

In conclusion, perceptual training led to behavioral convergence between the two groups, but computational differences remained. These findings challenge the idea of a single explanation for multisensory plasticity and demonstrate how the same perceptual outcome can mask adaptations occurring at various levels of the information-processing hierarchy.