The audiovisual perception of biological motion
Poster Presentation

Ben Schouten
University of Leuven, Laboratory for Experimental Psychology

Karl Verfaillie
University of Leuven, Laboratory for Experimental Psychology

     Abstract ID Number: 54
     Full text: Not available
     Last modified: March 15, 2006
     Presentation date: 06/20/2006 10:00 AM in Hamilton Building, Foyer
     (View Schedule)

Abstract
The perception of human actions is frequently studied using ‘point-light figures’. This research on the perception of biological motion is traditionally restricted to the visual modality. In contrast, research on multisensory integration specifically concentrates on the interaction of different sensory modalities. A key finding in the latter work is that temporally, spatially or semantically congruent multimodal stimuli are recognized better and faster than unimodal or incongruent multimodal stimuli. Moreover, the recent discovery of audiovisual mirror neurons in the premotor cortex of the monkey and the finding that visual and auditory information about actions are integrated in the superior temporal sulcus have lead some researchers to conclude that actions may be represented audiovisually. The current research explores two methods to investigate the audiovisual perception of biological motion. The first method investigates to what extent a rhythmic sound can enhance the detection of a visually masked point-light walker by means of an adaptive staircase procedure. The second method assesses the applicability of perturbation analysis to estimate the weights given to the separate sources of action information (auditory and visual) and verifies whether humans integrate audiovisual information about actions in a statistically optimal fashion.