Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

It is well known that the nervous system combines information from different cues within and across sensory modalities to improve performance on perceptual tasks. In this article, we present results showing that in a visual motion-detection task, concurrent auditory motion stimuli improve accuracy even when they do not provide any useful information for the task. When participants judged which of two stimulus intervals contained visual coherent motion, the addition of identical moving sounds to both intervals improved accuracy. However, this enhancement occurred only with sounds that moved in the same direction as the visual motion. Therefore, it appears that the observed benefit of auditory stimulation is due to auditory-visual interactions at a sensory level. Thus, auditory and visual motion-processing pathways interact at a sensory-representation level in addition to the level at which perceptual estimates are combined.

Keywords

multisensory integration motion perception cross-modal interactions perception visual perception

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Alais

Burr

(2004a). No direction-specific bimodal facilitation for audiovisual motion detection. Cognitive Brain Research, 19, 185–194.

Alais

Burr

(2004b). The ventriloquist effect results from near-optimal bimodal integration. Current Biology, 14, 257–262.

Angelaki

D. E.

DeAngelis

G. C.

(2009). Multisensory integration: Psychophysics, neurophysiology, and computation. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 19, 452–458.

Driver

Noesselt

(2008). Multisensory interplay reveals crossmodal influences on “sensory-specific” brain regions, neural responses, and judgments. Neuron, 57, 11–23.

Ernst

M. O.

Banks

M. S.

(2002). Humans integrate visual and haptic information in a statistically optimal fashion. Nature, 415, 429–433.

Ernst

M. O.

Bülthoff

H. H.

(2004). Merging the senses into a robust percept. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 162–169.

Ghazanfar

Schroeder

C. E.

(2006). Is neocortex essentially multisensory? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 278–285.

Giard

M. H.

Peronnet

(1999). Auditory-visual integration during multimodal object recognition in humans: A behavioral and electrophysiological study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 11, 473–490.

Graziano

M. S.

(2001). A system of multimodal areas in the primate brain. Neuron, 29, 4–6.

10.

Kim

R. S.

Seitz

A. R.

Shams

(2008). Benefits of stimulus congruency for multisensory facilitation of visual learning. PLoS ONE, 3, e1532. Retrieved from http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0001532

11.

Körding

Beierholm

W. J.

Tenenbaum

J. M.

Quartz

Shams

(2007). Causal inference in multisensory perception. PLoS ONE, 2, e943. Retrieved from http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0000943

12.

Lewis

Van Essen

(2000). Corticocortical connections of visual, sensorimotor and multimodal processing areas in parietal lobe of macaque monkey. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 428, 112–137.

13.

Lopez-Moliner

Soto-Faraco

(2007). Vision affects how fast we hear sounds move. Journal of Vision, 7(12), Article 6. Retrieved from http://www.journalofvision.org/content/7/12/6

14.

Meredith

M. A.

Stein

B. E.

(1983). Interactions among converging sensory inputs in the superior colliculus. Science, 221, 389–391.

15.

Pearl

(1988). Probabilistic reasoning in intelligent systems: Networks of plausible inference. San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.

16.

Poirier

Collignon

Devolder

A. G.

Renier

Vanlierde

Tranduy

Scheiber

(2005). Specific activation of the V5 brain area by auditory motion processing: An fMRI study. Cognitive Brain Research, 25, 650–658.

17.

Scheef

Boecker

Daamen

Fehse

Landsberg

M. W.

Granath

D. O.

Effenberg

A. O.

(2009). Multimodal motion processing in area V5/MT: Evidence from an artificial class of audio-visual events. Brain Research, 1252, 94–104.

18.

Schroeder

C. E.

Foxe

(2005). Multisensory contributions to low-level, “unisensory” processing. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 15, 454–458.

19.

Seitz

A. R.

Kim

Shams

(2006). Sound facilitates visual learning. Current Biology, 16, 1422–1427.

20.

Shams

Beierholm

(2010). Causal inference in perception. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14, 425–432.

21.

Shams

Iwaki

Chawla

Bhattacharya

(2005). Early modulation of visual cortex by sound: An MEG study. Neuroscience Letters, 378, 76–81.

22.

Shams

Kamitani

Thompson

Shimojo

(2001). Sound alters visual evoked potentials in humans. NeuroReport, 12, 3849–3852.

23.

Shams

W. J.

Beierholm

(2005). Sound-induced flash illusion as an optimal percept. NeuroReport, 16, 1923–1927.

24.

Shimojo

Shams

(2001). Sensory modalities are not separate modalities: Plasticity and interactions. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 11, 505–509.

25.

Treue

Martínez Trujillo

J. C.

(1999). Feature-based attention influences motion processing gain in macaque visual cortex. Nature, 399, 575–579.

26.

Watkins

Shams

Josephs

Rees

(2007). Activity in human V1 follows multisensory perception. NeuroImage, 37, 572–578.

27.

Watkins

Shams

Tanaka

Haynes

J.-D.

Rees

(2006). Sound alters activity in human V1 in association with illusory visual perception. NeuroImage, 31, 1247–1256.

28.

Witten

I. B.

Knudsen

E. I.

(2005). Why seeing is believing: Merging auditory and visual worlds. Neuron, 48, 489–496.

29.

Wozny

D. R.

Beierholm

U. R.

Shams

(2008). Human trimodal perception follows optimal statistical inference. Journal of Vision, 8(3), Article 24. Retrieved from http://www.journalofvision.org/content/8/3/24

30.

Wuerger

S. M.

Hofbauer

Meyer

G. F.

(2003). The integration of auditory and visual motion signals at threshold. Perception & Psychophysics, 65, 1188–1196.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.02 MB

0 + 1 > 1

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References

Supplementary Material