Multisensory perception in uncertain environments

Munoz, Nicole E.; Blumstein, Daniel T.

doi:10.1093/beheco/arr220

Cited by 174 publications

(199 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…By design, the images were created to be minimally evocative (see the electronic supplementary material) while the non-control sounds were created to be affectively charged. Thus, the different types of potential information contained in these stimuli could account for the antagonistic perceptual response [10] that we discovered. Alternatively, it is possible that more stimuli increased the cognitive demands or that the visual stimuli distracted [11] participants in some way thus reducing the effectiveness of the simulated nonlinearities to evoke emotional responses.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

The sound of arousal in music is context-dependent

Blumstein¹,

Bryant

Kaye

2012

Biol. Lett.

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These authors contributed equally to this study.Humans, and many non-human animals, produce and respond to harsh, unpredictable, nonlinear sounds when alarmed, possibly because these are produced when acoustic production systems (vocal cords and syrinxes) are overblown in stressful, dangerous situations. Humans can simulate nonlinearities in music and soundtracks through the use of technological manipulations. Recent work found that film soundtracks from different genres differentially contain such sounds. We designed two experiments to determine specifically how simulated nonlinearities in soundtracks influence perceptions of arousal and valence. Subjects were presented with emotionally neutral musical exemplars that had neither noise nor abrupt frequency transitions, or versions of these musical exemplars that had noise or abrupt frequency upshifts or downshifts experimentally added. In a second experiment, these acoustic exemplars were paired with benign videos. Judgements of both arousal and valence were altered by the addition of these simulated nonlinearities in the first, music-only, experiment. In the second, multi-modal, experiment, valence (but not arousal) decreased with the addition of noise or frequency downshifts. Thus, the presence of a video image suppressed the ability of simulated nonlinearities to modify arousal. This is the first study examining how nonlinear simulations in music affect emotional judgements. These results demonstrate that the perception of potentially fearful or arousing sounds is influenced by the perceptual context and that the addition of a visual modality can antagonistically suppress the response to an acoustic stimulus.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

The sound of arousal in music is context-dependent

Blumstein¹,

Bryant

Kaye

2012

Biol. Lett.

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“…Extant laboratory research in cognitive psychology and sensory neuroscience demonstrates enhanced multisensory integration of those sensory features that correspond crossmodally (see Parise & Spence, 2009;Spence, 2011, for a review). Enhanced multisensory integration, in turn, can result in (from a marketing perspective desirable) effects such as reduced sensory uncertainty (Munoz & Blumstein, 2012), increased attention capturing (Matusz & Eimer, 2011), and superadditive neural responses (Small, et al, 2004). Consistent with this idea, the beneficial effects of multisensory congruence on consumer preferences have been demonstrated for haptic-olfactory stimulus combinations and high-level semantic attributes (Krishna, Elder, & Caldara, 2010).…”

Section: Practical Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 88%

That Sounds Sweet: Using Cross‐Modal Correspondences to Communicate Gustatory Attributes

Knoeferle

Woods

Käppler

et al. 2014

Psychology and Marketing

108

107

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Building on existing research into sound symbolism and cross‐modal correspondences, this article proposes that cross‐modal correspondences—systematic mappings between different sensory modalities—can be used to communicate nonmusical, low‐level sensory properties such as basic tastes through music. A series of three experiments demonstrates that cross‐modal correspondences enable people to systematically encode basic taste properties into parameters in musical space (Experiment 1), and that they are able to correctly decode basic taste information embedded in complex musical compositions (Experiments 2 and 3). The results also suggest some culture‐specificity to these mappings, given that decoding performance, while still above chance levels, was lower in Indian participants than in those from the United States (Experiment 3). Implications and potential applications of these findings are discussed.

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“…For an ovipositing female in a polyphagous insect, such as S. littoralis, environmental uncertainty may lead to errors in decision making and can have effects on fitness, for example through prolonged search time or increased predation risk (Munoz and Blumstein, 2012). Compounds that are produced de novo after herbivore damage provide reliable cues with high informational value through their high specificity that can increase signal to noise ratio and thus reduce uncertainty about the environment during host plant search (Dall et al, 2005).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Specific response to herbivore-inducedde novosynthesized plant volatiles provide reliable information for host plant selection in a moth

Zakir

Bengtsson

Sadek

et al. 2013

Journal of Experimental Biology

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SUMMARYAnimals depend on reliable sensory information for accurate behavioural decisions. For herbivorous insects it is crucial to find host plants for feeding and reproduction, and these insects must be able to differentiate suitable from unsuitable plants. Volatiles are important cues for insect herbivores to assess host plant quality. It has previously been shown that female moths of the Egyptian cotton leafworm, Spodoptera littoralis (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae), avoid oviposition on damaged cotton Gossypium hirsutum, which may mediated by herbivore-induced plant volatiles (HIPVs). Among the HIPVs, some volatiles are released following any type of damage while others are synthesized de novo and released by the plants only in response to herbivore damage. In behavioural experiments we here show that oviposition by S. littoralis on undamaged cotton plants was reduced by adding volatiles collected from plants with ongoing herbivory. Gas chromatography-electroantennographic detection (GC-EAD) recordings revealed that antennae of mated S. littoralis females responded to 18 compounds from a collection of headspace volatiles of damaged cotton plants. Among these compounds, a blend of the seven de novo synthesized volatile compounds was found to reduce oviposition in S. littoralis on undamaged plants under both laboratory and ambient (field) conditions in Egypt. Volatile compounds that are not produced de novo by the plants did not affect oviposition. Our results show that ovipositing females respond specifically to the de novo synthesized volatiles released from plants under herbivore attack. We suggest that these volatiles provide reliable cues for ovipositing females to detect plants that could provide reduced quality food for their offspring and an increased risk of competition and predation.

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Multisensory perception in uncertain environments

Cited by 174 publications

References 53 publications

The sound of arousal in music is context-dependent

The sound of arousal in music is context-dependent

That Sounds Sweet: Using Cross‐Modal Correspondences to Communicate Gustatory Attributes

Specific response to herbivore-inducedde novosynthesized plant volatiles provide reliable information for host plant selection in a moth

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