Abstract: The temporal coincidence of cross-modal stimuli is required for multisensory integration. But due to the difference in physical and neural transmission times of information streams, this temporal synchrony is far from perfect. Temporal recalibration refers to the phenomenon that the brain adapts itself to (small) temporal asynchronies, thus reflecting the plasticity of multisensory integration in time. After exposure to asynchronous cross-modal stimulus pairs, participants show shifts in their point of subjective simultaneity towards the particular temporal lag. This paper reviews the modality-combination effect on adaptation aftereffects and the underlying mechanism of temporal recalibration, its initial processing stage, the relationship between temporal recalibration and stimulus content extracting, and the main influencing factors. Future researchers would investigate the following issues, e.g. whether temporal recalibration could happen at early processing stage, whether its process is initiated or mediated by late cognitive activity, and whether it is affected by spatial selective attention. Combined with studies on neural substrates, a comprehensive perspective will benefit the theoretical construct of temporal recalibration.

Key words: temporal recalibration, temporal synchrony, multisensory integration, perceptual latency, temporal feature