A Comparison of Auditory and Visual Apparent Motion Presented Individually and with Crossmodal Moving Distractors

Abstract

Unimodal auditory and visual apparent motion (AM) and bimodal audiovisual AM were investigated to determine the effects of crossmodal integration on motion perception and direction-of-motion discrimination in each modality. To determine the optimal stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) ranges for motion perception and direction discrimination, we initially measured unimodal visual and auditory AMs using one of four durations (50, 100, 200, or 400 ms) and ten SOAs (40-450 ms). In the bimodal conditions, auditory and visual AM were measured in the presence of temporally synchronous, spatially displaced distractors that were either congruent (moving in the same direction) or conflicting (moving in the opposite direction) with respect to target motion. Participants reported whether continuous motion was perceived and its direction. With unimodal auditory and visual AM, motion perception was affected differently by stimulus duration and SOA in the two modalities, while the opposite was observed for direction of motion. In the bimodal audiovisual AM condition, discriminating the direction of motion was affected only in the case of an auditory target. The perceived direction of auditory but not visual AM was reduced to chance levels when the crossmodal distractor direction was conflicting. Conversely, motion perception was unaffected by the distractor direction and, in some cases, the mere presence of a distractor facilitated movement perception.

Capture of Intermodal Visual/Tactile Apparent Motion by Moving and Static Sound

“…The direction of visual stimuli can capture the direction of auditory apparent motion but it has not yet been shown that the direction cues in the auditory stimuli can capture the direction of visual apparent motion Soto-Faraco et al, 2004b;Strybel and Vatakis, 2004). Likewise, the tactile motion distractors have a stronger influence upon the perception of auditory motion direction than auditory motion distractors do on tactile perception (Soto-Faraco et al, 2004a), and the visual motion distractors have a stronger influence on the perception of tactile motion direction than tactile motion distractors do on visual perception (Bensmaïa et al, 2006;Craig, 2006;Lyons et al, 2006).…”

Cross-Sensory Facilitation Reveals Neural Interactions between Visual and Tactile Motion in Humans

“…Similarly, auditory motion stimuli affect the direction of tactile motion (Soto-Faraco et al, 2004), mutual enhancement between vision and auditory motion has been observed (Strybel and Vatakis, 2004), and reaction times are fast to visuo-tactile motion then to either alone (Ushioda and Wada, 2007). Integration has also been shown for visuo-tactile apparent motion across fingers, but the integration seemed to occur at a high rather than low level (Harrar et al, 2008).…”

Investigating the In-Between: Multisensory Integration of Auditory and Visual Motion Streams

“…In particular, they mention one important shortcoming of previous studies: the locations of the stimuli in both modalities were not spatially congruent, due to the use of headphones for the auditory stimuli. Strict spatial correspondence of visual and auditory stimuli, on the other hand, has been reported to be essential for the occurrence of multisensory integration effects (Meyer et al, 2005;Strybel and Vatakis, 2004), a fact that also found expression in the classical rules of multisensory integration as mentioned above.…”

“…The participants' task was to listen to each stimulus sequence and to perform a standard classification of the perceived quality of motion into one of four categories: (1) simultaneous presentation -all sounds were heard at the same time, (2) continuous motion -a single sound moved continuously from one side to the other, (3) broken motion -the movement was discontinuous, broken and interrupted and (4) succession of discrete events -the sounds were perceived successively, with no movement between them. This standard categorization system, originally developed by Briggs and Perrot (1972) for the study of AAM, has been used in a number of subsequent investigations on AAM (e.g., Perrot, 1974;Strybel et al, 1989Strybel et al, , 1990Strybel et al, , 1992 and in a modified form on VAM (e.g., Bruns and Getzmann, 2008;Getzmann, 2007;Strybel and Menges, 1998;Strybel and Vatakis, 2004). Prior to the experimental session, the participant was instructed about the experimental procedure, was thereafter given ten stimulus sequences as an example, and was afterwards allowed to ask questions to the experimenter.…”

“…While most studies indicate that only auditory motion perception can be influenced by vision whereas visual motion perception seems to be insusceptible to auditory distraction (e.g., Allen and Kolers, 1981;Soto-Faraco et al, 2002;Strybel and Vatakis, 2004), some authors have raised the possibility that AM is truly symmetric multisensory phenomenon, in which visual and auditory streams interfere with one another or even induce a synesthetic perception of motion bearing both auditory and visual qualities (e.g., Getzmann, 2007;Zapparoli and Reatto, 1969). It therefore remains unclear, whether a dominance of vision over audition as mentioned above applies to the field of AM as well.…”