University of Virginia, Department of Psychology, United States; Villanova University, Psychological and Brain Sciences Department, United States.
University of Virginia, Department of Psychology, United States.
Cognition. 2018 Jun;175:101-108. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2018.02.015. Epub 2018 Feb 24.
An audiovisual correspondence (AVC) refers to an observer's seemingly arbitrary yet consistent matching of sensory features across the two modalities; for example, between an auditory pitch and visual size. Research on AVCs has frequently used a speeded classification procedure in which participants are asked to rapidly classify an image when it is either accompanied by a congruent or an incongruent sound (or vice versa). When, as is typically the case, classification is faster in the presence of a congruent stimulus, researchers have inferred that the AVC is automatic and bottom-up. Such an inference is incomplete because the procedure does not show that the AVC is not subject to top-down influences. To remedy this problem, we devised a procedure that allows us to assess the degree of "bottom-up-ness" and "top-down-ness" in the processing of an AVC. We did this in studies of AVCs between pitch and five visual features: size, height, spatial frequency, brightness, and angularity. We find that all the AVCs we studied involve both bottom-up and top-down processing, thus undermining the prevalent generalization that AVCs are automatic.
视听对应（AVC）是指观察者在两种模式之间看似随意但一致的感官特征匹配；例如，在听觉音调和视觉大小之间。AVC 的研究经常使用一种快速分类程序，要求参与者在图像出现时快速分类，无论是伴随一致的声音还是不一致的声音（反之亦然）。当刺激一致时，如通常情况下，分类更快，研究人员推断 AVC 是自动的和自下而上的。这种推断并不完整，因为该程序并未表明 AVC 不受自上而下的影响。为了解决这个问题，我们设计了一种程序，可以评估 AVC 处理过程中的“自下而上”和“自上而下”程度。我们在对音高和五个视觉特征（大小、高度、空间频率、亮度和角度）之间的 AVC 的研究中做到了这一点。我们发现，我们研究的所有 AVC 都涉及自下而上和自上而下的处理，从而破坏了 AVC 是自动的普遍观点。
