Department of Biological and Experimental Psychology, School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS, UK.
Department of Psychosis Studies, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King's College London, London, UK.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2022 Oct;84(7):2293-2302. doi: 10.3758/s13414-022-02468-5. Epub 2022 Mar 31.
The "ventriloquism effect" describes an illusory phenomenon where the perceived location of an auditory stimulus is pulled toward the location of a visual stimulus. Ventriloquists use this phenomenon to create an illusion where an inanimate puppet is perceived to speak. Ventriloquists use the expression and suppression of their own and the puppet's mouth movements as well the direction of their respective eye gaze to maximize the illusion. While the puppet's often exaggerated mouth movements have been demonstrated to enhance the ventriloquism effect, the contribution of direct eye gaze remains unknown. In Experiment 1, participants viewed an image of a person's face while hearing a temporally synchronous recording of a voice originating from different locations on the azimuthal plane. The eyes of the facial stimuli were either looking directly at participants or were closed. Participants were more likely to misperceive the location of a range of voice locations as coming from a central position when the eye gaze of the facial stimuli were directed toward them. Thus, direct gaze enhances the ventriloquist effect by attracting participants' perception of the voice locations toward the location of the face. In an exploratory analysis, we furthermore found no evidence for an other-race effect between White vs Asian listeners. In Experiment 2, we replicated the effect of direct eye gaze on the ventriloquism effect, also showing that faces per se attract perceived sound locations compared with audio-only sound localization. Showing a modulation of the ventriloquism effect by socially-salient eye gaze information thus adds to previous findings reporting top-down influences on this effect.
“腹语效应”描述了一种错觉现象，即听觉刺激的感知位置被拉向视觉刺激的位置。腹语师利用这一现象创造出一种错觉，即一个无生命的木偶被感知为在说话。腹语师使用自己和木偶的口型的表达和抑制以及各自的眼神注视方向来最大限度地增强错觉。虽然已经证明木偶夸张的口型运动可以增强腹语效应，但直接眼神注视的作用仍不清楚。在实验 1 中，参与者观看一张人脸的图像，同时听到来自方位平面上不同位置的同步录音的声音。面部刺激物的眼睛要么直接看着参与者，要么闭着。当面部刺激物的目光注视参与者时，参与者更有可能错误地将一系列声音位置的感知位置误认为来自中央位置。因此，直接注视通过将参与者对声音位置的感知吸引到面部位置来增强腹语师的效果。在一项探索性分析中，我们还没有发现白人和亚洲听众之间存在异族效应的证据。在实验 2 中，我们复制了直接眼神注视对腹语效应的影响，也表明与仅音频声音定位相比，人脸本身会吸引感知声音位置。因此，社会显著眼神注视信息对腹语效应的调节增加了先前报告的对这种效应的自上而下影响的发现。
