Scaling effects in crossmodal improvement of visual perception

Abstract

Inspired in the work of J. Gonzalo [Dinámica Cerebral. Publ. Red Comput. Natural y Artificial, Univ. Santiago de Compostela, Spain 2010] on multisensory effects and crossmodal facilitation of perception in patients with cerebral cortical lesions, we have observed and modelled weaker but similar effects in normal subjects: Moderate and static muscular effort improves visual vernier acuity in ten tested normal subjects, and a scaling power law describes the improvement with the intensity of the effort. This suggests that the mechanism of activation of unspecific (or multispecific) neural mass in the facilitation phenomena in damaged brain is also involved in the normal brain, and that the power law reflects a basic biological scaling with the activated neural mass, inherent to natural networks. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.