Auditory effects to complement the absence of visual information
Date: 2012-06-21 01:30 PM – 03:00 PM
Last modified: 2012-05-03
Abstract
The majority of research on audio-visual interaction focused on spatio-temporal factors and synesthesia-like phenomena. Especially, research on synesthesia-like phenomena has been advanced by Mark et al., and they found synesthesia-like correlation between brightness and size of visual stimuli and pitch of auditory stimuli (Mark, 1987). It seems that main interest of research on synesthesia-like phenomena is what perceptual similarity/difference between synesthetes and non-synesthetes is. We guessed that cross-modal phenomena of non-synethetes on perceptual level emerge as a function to complement the absence or ambiguity of a certain stimulus. To verify the hypothesis, we investigated audio-visual interaction using movement (speed) of object as visual stimuli and sine-wave as auditory stimuli. In this experiment objects (circles) moved at a fixed speed in one trial and the objects were masked in arbitrary positions , and auditory stimuli (high, middle, low pitch) were given simultaneously with the vanish of objects. Subject reported the expecting position of the objects when auditory stimuli stopped. Result showed that correlation between the position, i.e., the movement speed, of the object and pitch of sound was found. We conjecture that cross-modal phenomena on non-synethetes tend to occur when one of sensory stimuli are absent/ambiguous.
References
Marks, L. E (1987). On cross-modal similarity: Auditory-visual interaction in speeded discrimination. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 13, 384-394