Queensland Brain Institute, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Queensland 4072, Australia.
Brain Cogn. 2011 Feb;75(1):60-6. doi: 10.1016/j.bandc.2010.09.005. Epub 2010 Nov 9.
Integration of simultaneous auditory and visual information about an event can enhance our ability to detect that event. This is particularly evident in the perception of speech, where the articulatory gestures of the speaker's lips and face can significantly improve the listener's detection and identification of the message, especially when that message is presented in a noisy background. Speech is a particularly important example of multisensory integration because of its behavioural relevance to humans and also because brain regions have been identified that appear to be specifically tuned for auditory speech and lip gestures. Previous research has suggested that speech stimuli may have an advantage over other types of auditory stimuli in terms of audio-visual integration. Here, we used a modified adaptive psychophysical staircase approach to compare the influence of congruent visual stimuli (brief movie clips) on the detection of noise-masked auditory speech and non-speech stimuli. We found that congruent visual stimuli significantly improved detection of an auditory stimulus relative to incongruent visual stimuli. This effect, however, was equally apparent for speech and non-speech stimuli. The findings suggest that speech stimuli are not specifically advantaged by audio-visual integration for detection at threshold when compared with other naturalistic sounds.
事件的听觉和视觉信息的整合可以提高我们检测该事件的能力。这在言语感知中尤为明显，说话者的嘴唇和面部的发音动作可以显著提高听者对信息的检测和识别能力，尤其是当信息在嘈杂的背景中呈现时。言语是多感官整合的一个特别重要的例子，因为它与人类的行为相关性很强，而且大脑区域也被确定为专门针对听觉言语和唇动进行调谐。以前的研究表明，在视听整合方面，言语刺激可能比其他类型的听觉刺激具有优势。在这里，我们使用了一种改良的自适应心理物理阶梯方法来比较一致的视觉刺激（简短的电影片段）对噪声掩蔽听觉言语和非言语刺激的检测的影响。我们发现，相对于不一致的视觉刺激，一致的视觉刺激显著提高了对听觉刺激的检测。然而，这种效果对于言语和非言语刺激同样明显。这些发现表明，与其他自然声音相比，在检测阈值时，视听整合并没有使言语刺激在检测方面具有特殊优势。
