Investigating the role of audition in spatial perception of natural visual scenes
Daniel K. Rogers, Jason S. Chan, Fiona N. Newell
Poster
Last modified: 2008-05-13
Abstract
Crossmodal links in spatial perception of real environments has been well documented in recent years. While there has been much research into the visual effects on sound localization (e.g ventriloquist effect), relatively little is known about how sound can affect visual localization in a scene. Here we investigate whether a spatially congruent sound enhances visual target detection in a visual scene compared to spatially incongruent multisensory stimuli. We also examined how scene context affects participants’ ability to identify the presence of the visual target. In our experiment, participants had to detect the presence or absence of a visual target in a sequence of randomly presented visual scenes while simultaneously listening to task irrelevant sounds. We hypothesized that target detection would improve for scenes when the auditory and visual stimuli were spatially congruent. There was found to be a significant congruency effect in the target present condition. The results will be discussed in further detail at the conference.