Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Retzius väg 8, SE-171 77 Stockholm, Sweden.
Sci Rep. 2017 Jan 10;7:40123. doi: 10.1038/srep40123.
Can what we imagine hearing change what we see? Whether imagined sensory stimuli are integrated with external sensory stimuli to shape our perception of the world has only recently begun to come under scrutiny. Here, we made use of the cross-bounce illusion in which an auditory stimulus presented at the moment two passing objects meet promotes the perception that the objects bounce off rather than cross by one another to examine whether the content of imagined sound changes visual motion perception in a manner that is consistent with multisensory integration. The results from this study revealed that auditory imagery of a sound with acoustic properties typical of a collision (i.e., damped sound) promoted the bounce-percept, but auditory imagery of the same sound played backwards (i.e., ramped sound) did not. Moreover, the vividness of the participants' auditory imagery predicted the strength of this imagery-induced illusion. In a separate experiment, we ruled out the possibility that changes in attention (i.e., sensitivity index d') or response bias (response bias index c) were sufficient to explain this effect. Together, these findings suggest that this imagery-induced multisensory illusion reflects the successful integration of real and imagined cross-modal sensory stimuli, and more generally, that what we imagine hearing can change what we see.
我们想象听到的内容能改变我们看到的内容吗？想象中的感觉刺激是否与外部感觉刺激整合在一起，从而塑造我们对世界的感知，这一点直到最近才开始受到关注。在这里，我们利用了交叉反弹错觉，即在两个经过的物体相遇的瞬间呈现听觉刺激，会促使人们认为物体是反弹而不是相互交叉。研究目的是检验想象中的声音内容是否以与多感觉整合一致的方式改变视觉运动感知。本研究的结果表明，具有碰撞声特性（即阻尼声）的声音的听觉想象促进了反弹感知，但以相反方向播放的相同声音（即斜坡声）的听觉想象则没有。此外，参与者听觉想象的生动程度预测了这种想象引起的错觉的强度。在另一个实验中，我们排除了注意力变化（即敏感指数 d'）或反应偏差（反应偏差指数 c）足以解释这种效果的可能性。总之，这些发现表明，这种想象引起的多感觉错觉反映了真实和想象的跨模态感觉刺激的成功整合，更普遍地说，我们想象听到的内容可以改变我们看到的内容。
