Maiworm Mario, Bellantoni Marina, Spence Charles, Röder Brigitte
Department of Psychology, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2012 Aug;74(6):1302-11. doi: 10.3758/s13414-012-0310-3.
We constantly integrate the information that is available to our various senses. The extent to which the mechanisms of multisensory integration are subject to the influences of attention, emotion, and/or motivation is currently unknown. The "ventriloquist effect" is widely assumed to be an automatic crossmodal phenomenon, shifting the perceived location of an auditory stimulus toward a concurrently presented visual stimulus. In the present study, we examined whether audiovisual binding, as indicated by the magnitude of the ventriloquist effect, is influenced by threatening auditory stimuli presented prior to the ventriloquist experiment. Syllables spoken in a fearful voice were presented from one of eight loudspeakers, while syllables spoken in a neutral voice were presented from the other seven locations. Subsequently, participants had to localize pure tones while trying to ignore concurrent visual stimuli (both the auditory and the visual stimuli here were emotionally neutral). A reliable ventriloquist effect was observed. The emotional stimulus manipulation resulted in a reduction of the magnitude of the subsequently measured ventriloquist effect in both hemifields, as compared to a control group exposed to a similar attention-capturing, but nonemotional, manipulation. These results suggest that the emotional system is capable of influencing multisensory binding processes that have heretofore been considered automatic.
我们不断整合各种感官所获取的信息。目前尚不清楚多感官整合机制在多大程度上会受到注意力、情绪和/或动机的影响。人们普遍认为“腹语效应”是一种自动的跨模态现象，会将听觉刺激的感知位置朝着同时呈现的视觉刺激方向转移。在本研究中，我们考察了由腹语效应大小所表明的视听绑定是否会受到腹语实验之前呈现的威胁性听觉刺激的影响。从八个扬声器中的一个播放用恐惧声音说出的音节，而从其他七个位置播放用中性声音说出的音节。随后，参与者必须对纯音进行定位，同时试图忽略同时出现的视觉刺激（此处听觉和视觉刺激在情绪上均为中性）。观察到了可靠的腹语效应。与接受类似的吸引注意力但无情感的操作的对照组相比，情绪刺激操作导致随后测量的两个半视野中的腹语效应大小均减小。这些结果表明，情绪系统能够影响迄今为止被认为是自动的多感官绑定过程。
