Audio-visual interaction in judging direction of change of stimulus frequency
Poster

Yuji Wada
Department of Psychology, Nihon University

Keiko Okawa
Department of Psychology, Nihon University

Norimichi Kitagwa
Department of Psychology, Tokyo Metropolitan University

Kaoru Noguchi
Department of Psychology, Nihon University

     Abstract ID Number: 97
     Full text: Not available
     Last modified: May 20, 2003

Abstract
In situations of audio-visual interaction, researches have generally found that audition prevails over vision in temporal perception, while vision is dominant over audition for spatial perception. It has been reported that modality appropriateness to a given task determines the direction of this inter-modality effect. However, we have found a reverse effect in some situations where a change in the frequency of visual stimuli is associated with a perceived change in the frequency of auditory stimuli (Wada et al., 2002). In the present experiment, participants were asked to judge the change in the frequency of visual flicker and auditory flutter stimuli. In some conditions either the auditory or the visual information was ambiguous. In addition to the expected finding that a change in the frequency of the auditory stimuli induced a perceived change in the frequency of the visual stimuli, we demonstrated a new phenomenon: when ambiguous auditory temporal cues were presented, the change in the frequency of the visual stimuli was associated with a perceived change in the frequency of the auditory stimuli. This suggests that cross-modal asymmetry effects are influenced by the reliability of visual and auditory information as well as modality appropriateness.