4th Annual Meeting of the International Multisensory Research Forum
    Home > Papers > Lars Ross
Lars Ross

How the quality of sounds can affect the perception of a bistable motion event
Single Paper Presentation

Lars Ross
Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, Institute for Basic Research in Developmental Disabilities, City College of the City University New York

David Lewkowicz
Institute for Basic Research in Developmental Disabilities

Sophie Molholm
Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research

John Foxe
Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research

     Abstract ID Number: 145
     Full text: Not available
     Last modified: May 20, 2003

Abstract
The presence of sound can induce dramatic effects upon perception of an ambiguous visual event. When two identical visual stimuli move along the same path towards and then past one another, observers usually report that the stimuli stream through each other. In contrast, when a sound is presented at the moment the stimuli coincide, observers tend to report bouncing. One mechanism proposed to account for this kind of bistable motion event contends that the sound disrupts an ongoing attentional process in the human motion processing areas. On the other hand post-perceptual processes may be involved in a "late" integration of the sound and an interpretation of the sound as an indicator for a collision. Here, we investigated whether the quality, or in other words, "real-world" meaning of sounds can affect the perception of visual events differentially. To test this idea we introduced a "swoosh" sound at the moment of coincidence, a sound that is usually associated with objects passing one another and compared subjects' responses to conditions where we presented an impact sound, usually associated with colliding objects. Results indicated that subjects reported bouncing in the presence of the bounce sound but rarely reported bouncing when the swoosh sound was presented. These findings show that not only the presence of a sound but especially its meaningfulness can produce categorically different visual percepts of an ambiguous visual event, suggesting a more complex integration of sound and vision than previously thought.


    Learn more
    about this
    publishing
    project...


Public Knowledge

 
Open Access Research
home | overview | program
papers | organization | links
  Top