The movement of an organism typically provides an observer with information in more than one sensory modality. The integration of information modalities reduces the likelihood that the observer will be confronted with a scene that is perceptually ambiguous. With that in mind, observers were presented with a series of point-light walkers each of which varied in the strength of the gender information they carried. Presenting those stimuli with auditory walking sequences containing ambiguous gender information had no eVect on observers' ratings of visually perceived gender. When the visual stimuli were paired with auditory cues that were unambiguously female, observers' judgments of walker gender shifted such that ambiguous walkers were judged to look more female. To show that this is a perceptual rather than a cognitive eVect, we induced visual gender after-eVects with and without accompanying female auditory cues. The pairing of gender-neutral visual stimuli with unambiguous female auditory cues during adaptation elicited male after-eVects. These data suggest that biological motion processing mechanisms can integrate auditory and visual cues to facilitate the extraction of higher-order features like gender. Possible neural substrates are discussed.
Johnson and Tassinary (2005) proposed that visually perceived sex is signalled by structural or form cues. They suggested also that biological motion cues signal sex, but do so indirectly. We previously have shown that auditory cues can mediate visual sex perceptions (van der Zwan et al., 2009). Here we demonstrate that structural cues to body shape are alone sufficient for visual sex discriminations but that biological motion cues alone are not. Interestingly, biological motions can resolve ambiguous structural cues to sex, but so can olfactory cues even when those cues are not salient. To accommodate these findings we propose an alternative model of the processes mediating visual sex discriminations: Form cues can be used directly if they are available and unambiguous. If there is any ambiguity other sensory cues are used to resolve it, suggesting there may exist sex-detectors that are stimulus independent.
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