Plass John, Guzman-Martinez Emmanuel, Ortega Laura, Suzuki Satoru, Grabowecky Marcia
Department of Psychology, Northwestern University, Swift Hall 102, 2029 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL, 60208, USA.
Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program, Northwestern University, Swift Hall 102, 2029 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL, 60208, USA.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2017 Oct;79(7):2055-2063. doi: 10.3758/s13414-017-1355-0.
Multisensory integration can play a critical role in producing unified and reliable perceptual experience. When sensory information in one modality is degraded or ambiguous, information from other senses can crossmodally resolve perceptual ambiguities. Prior research suggests that auditory information can disambiguate the contents of visual awareness by facilitating perception of intermodally consistent stimuli. However, it is unclear whether these effects are truly due to crossmodal facilitation or are mediated by voluntary selective attention to audiovisually congruent stimuli. Here, we demonstrate that sounds can bias competition in binocular rivalry toward audiovisually congruent percepts, even when participants have no recognition of the congruency. When speech sounds were presented in synchrony with speech-like deformations of rivalling ellipses, ellipses with crossmodally congruent deformations were perceptually dominant over those with incongruent deformations. This effect was observed in participants who could not identify the crossmodal congruency in an open-ended interview (Experiment 1) or detect it in a simple 2AFC task (Experiment 2), suggesting that the effect was not due to voluntary selective attention or response bias. These results suggest that sound can automatically disambiguate the contents of visual awareness by facilitating perception of audiovisually congruent stimuli.
多感官整合在产生统一且可靠的感知体验中可发挥关键作用。当一种模态的感官信息退化或模糊不清时，来自其他感官的信息能够跨模态地解决感知模糊性问题。先前的研究表明，听觉信息可以通过促进对跨模态一致刺激的感知来消除视觉意识内容的模糊性。然而，尚不清楚这些效应是否真的归因于跨模态促进作用，还是由对视听一致刺激的自愿选择性注意所介导。在此，我们证明，即使参与者未识别出一致性，声音也能使双眼竞争朝着视听一致的感知方向倾斜。当语音与相互竞争的椭圆的类似语音的变形同步呈现时，具有跨模态一致变形的椭圆在感知上比具有不一致变形的椭圆更占优势。在开放式访谈中无法识别跨模态一致性（实验1）或在简单的二选一迫选任务中无法检测到跨模态一致性（实验2）的参与者中观察到了这种效应，这表明该效应并非由于自愿选择性注意或反应偏差所致。这些结果表明，声音可以通过促进对视听一致刺激的感知来自动消除视觉意识内容的模糊性。
