![]() The circadian rhythms of their activities under natural light conditions also indicate that gerbils are not fully nocturnal 12, and they show a greater diurnal tendency than domestic mice or laboratory rats 13. The gerbil’s retina also has a well-developed cone system 9, 10, and behavioural measurements of the animal’s grating acuity have suggested that the visual system of the gerbil is well adapted to a diurnal lifestyle 11. Here, we used the Mongolian gerbil, Meriones unguiculatus, as a subject because it has sensitive low-frequency hearing comparable to humans 5 and is considered a standard laboratory rodent, particularly in auditory neuroscience 6, 7, 8. The lack of an appropriate animal model has hindered our understanding of this integration at the cellular and network levels. ![]() However, as far as we know, there is no experimental evidence that animals other than humans are capable of experiencing this illusion. Because the sound-induced flash illusion is not related to human-specific perception (i.e., speech perception), unlike the McGurk effect, it is reasonable to assume that this type of multimodal integration is fairly common in many animal species. In the illusion, a brief flash accompanied by two brief sounds is often perceived as two flashes 3, 4. More recently, Shams and colleagues reported the “sound-induced flash illusion”, which demonstrates that the opposite interaction (i.e., an auditory modality altering a visual perception) can also occur. That audio-visual integration shows how significantly visual information (i.e., articulatory movement) contributes to auditory speech perception. A prominent example, the “McGurk effect” (or “McGurk–MacDonald illusion”), demonstrates that listening to the sound /ba/ with a video clip showing a person’s lip uttering /ga/ often results in a combined auditory perception, such as “da” 2. When two sensory modalities receive conflicting information simultaneously, the perception in one modality is sometimes modified to align with the information in the other modality to construct a coherent multi-modal percept 1. This result shows that the gerbil may experience the sound-induced flash illusion and indicates for the first time that rodents may have the capacity to integrate temporal content of perception in a sophisticated manner as do humans. An increase in exploration suggested that the animals perceived a flashing pattern differently only when the contradicting sound (double beeps) was presented simultaneously with a single flash. Then, various sound stimuli were introduced during test trials. The animals were first familiarised with repetitive single flashes. ![]() A light-emitting diode embedded within an object presented time-varying visual stimuli (different flashing patterns). The novel object recognition (NOR) paradigm was used to evaluate the gerbil’s natural (i.e., untrained) capacity for multimodal integration. Therefore, we investigated whether the Mongolian gerbil, a rodent with relatively good eyesight, experiences this illusion. However, it is unclear whether nonhuman animals experience the illusion. This phenomenon, called the “sound-induced flash illusion”, has been investigated as an example of how humans finely integrate multisensory information, more specifically, the temporal content of perception. ![]() When two brief sounds are presented with a short flash of light, we often perceive that the flash blinks twice.
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