The capture of vision by audition : examining temporal ventriloquism

• Main Author: Morein-Zamir, Sharon
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/13289

Four experiments were conducted to investigate whether sounds can draw the perception of lights further apart in time in a visual temporal order judgment task, thereby improving performance. In the first experiment, presenting a sound before the first light and after the second light improved performance relative to the baseline condition in which sounds appeared simultaneously with the lights. The second . experiment ruled out a simple alerting account of this effect and indicated that the effect was due to the second sound trailing the second light. The third experiment extended the duration of the lags between the first sound and light, and the second light and sound, and found that performance returned to baseline level with lags of 450 milliseconds. In the final experiment, the second sound was found to improve performance only when the first sound was present, suggesting the importance of the pairing of the audiovisual stimuli. The results are interpreted as reflecting the temporal analogue of the classic spatial ventriloquist effect.