Heron J, Whitaker D, McGraw P V
Department of Optometry, University of Bradford, BD7 1DP, UK.
Vision Res. 2004 Nov;44(25):2875-84. doi: 10.1016/j.visres.2004.07.001.
Auditory signals have been shown to exert a marked influence on visual perception in a wide range of tasks. However, the mechanisms of these interactions are, at present, poorly understood. Here we present a series of experiments where a temporal cue within the auditory domain can significantly affect the localisation of a moving visual target. To investigate the mechanism of this interaction, we first modulated the spatial positional uncertainty of the visual target by varying its size. When visual positional uncertainty was low (small target size), auditory signals had little or no influence on perceived visual location. However, with increasing visual uncertainty (larger target sizes), auditory signals exerted a significantly greater influence on perceived visual location. We then altered the temporal profile of the auditory signal by modulating the spread of its Gaussian temporal envelope. Introducing this temporal uncertainty to the auditory signal greatly reduced its effect on visual localisation judgements. These findings support the view that the relative uncertainty in individual sensory domains governs the perceptual outcome of multisensory integration.
在广泛的任务中，听觉信号已被证明对视觉感知有显著影响。然而，目前这些相互作用的机制尚不清楚。在此，我们展示了一系列实验，其中听觉领域内的一个时间线索能够显著影响移动视觉目标的定位。为了研究这种相互作用的机制，我们首先通过改变视觉目标的大小来调节其空间位置不确定性。当视觉位置不确定性较低（目标尺寸小）时，听觉信号对感知到的视觉位置几乎没有影响。然而，随着视觉不确定性增加（目标尺寸更大），听觉信号对感知到的视觉位置产生了显著更大的影响。然后，我们通过调制高斯时间包络的扩展来改变听觉信号的时间分布。将这种时间不确定性引入听觉信号大大降低了其对视觉定位判断的影响。这些发现支持了这样一种观点，即各个感觉领域中的相对不确定性决定了多感官整合的感知结果。
