Completion of a visual motion representation by auditory information

Wataru Teramoto, Souta Hidaka, Jiro Gyoba, Yo-iti Suzuki
Poster
Time: 2009-07-01  09:00 AM – 10:30 AM
Last modified: 2009-06-04

Abstract


Humans perceive or recognize a moving visual object even if the object is temporarily invisible by an occluder. This fact suggests that the representation of the visual object is maintained by amodal completion mechanisms in each sensory modality and, likely (however, not well investigated so far), by information from the other modalities such as audition. In the present study, we investigated whether and how auditory information helps to maintain a visual motion representation. Kanai et al. (2007) showed that a transient gap of a smoothly moving visual stimulus could be easily detected if it occurred soon after the motion onset (< 200 ms), but less if it occurred later than 300 ms. This finding suggests that the motion representation evolves gradually with the increment of visual motion inputs, and that once the motion representation is fully constructed, the gap can be filled in. Thus, we used the detection performance of a transient gap within a visual motion sequence as an index of the completion of a motion representation. In our display, a sequence of visual stimuli in spatiotemporally adjacent positions was presented as smooth motion sequence in the horizontal direction for 800 ms. An occluder (173 ms) was set in the middle of the motion path. A transient gap (13.3 ms) was introduced into the motion sequence. The participants’ task was to detect the gap. Two independent variables were introduced: motion path (behind or in front of the occluder) and presentation of auditory motion which was simulated by dynamically changing the interaural level difference (ILD). When the visual stimulus traveled in front of the occluder, the previous finding was replicated – higher sensitivity to gaps soon after the motion onset and lower sensitivity to gaps later than 300 ms – irrespective of the presentation of auditory information. When the visual stimulus traveled behind the occluder (i.e., temporarily invisible) without auditory information, the detection performance was kept higher for the gaps later than 300 ms (i.e., after the occluder), indicating that the occluder disrupted or reset the formation of the motion representation. In contrast, when the motion sequence was accompanied with auditory information, the detection was impaired regardless of the occluder. These findings suggest that auditory information contributes to the maintenance of a visual motion representation when a moving visual object is temporarily invisible.

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