Temporal context shapes multicue integration in auditory time-to-contact judgments

Abstract

Abstract Anticipating when a moving object will arrive is fundamental for action. While vision-based time-to-contact (TTC) judgment follows reliability-weighted integration of motion and duration cues, it remains unclear whether audition supports similar computations. We asked listeners to judge TTC for moving sounds in motion-only, duration-only, and combined cue conditions, under fast and slow temporal contexts. Combined cues consistently improved precision, but temporal context reshaped bias. Indeed, integration generates remarkable delays in the fast regime and reduced anticipatory errors in the slow regime. Regression-to-the-mean effects revealed strong influences of context-dependent priors. A hierarchical model further suggested that adjusted cue weights in a manner broadly consistent with reliability-based cue use, while deviations from the flat-prior benchmark indicated that temporal context and priors shaped performance. These results indicate that auditory TTC is not a fixed computation, but an adaptive inference process shaped by temporal context, revealing a modality-specific route to predictive timing.