Abstract
BackgroundAudition provides important cues with regard to stimulus motion although vision may provide the most salient information. It has been reported that a sound of fixed intensity tends to be judged as decreasing in intensity after adaptation to looming visual stimuli or as increasing in intensity after adaptation to receding visual stimuli. This audiovisual interaction in motion aftereffects indicates that there are multimodal contributions to motion perception at early levels of sensory processing. However, there has been no report that sounds can induce the perception of visual motion.Methodology/Principal FindingsA visual stimulus blinking at a fixed location was perceived to be moving laterally when the flash onset was synchronized to an alternating left-right sound source. This illusory visual motion was strengthened with an increasing retinal eccentricity (2.5 deg to 20 deg) and occurred more frequently when the onsets of the audio and visual stimuli were synchronized.Conclusions/SignificanceWe clearly demonstrated that the alternation of sound location induces illusory visual motion when vision cannot provide accurate spatial information. The present findings strongly suggest that the neural representations of auditory and visual motion processing can bias each other, which yields the best estimates of external events in a complementary manner.
Highlights
In order to establish coherent and robust percepts of our surroundings, the perceptual system appropriately and flexibly combines or integrates multisensory inputs [1], depending on the accuracy and/or reliability of each input [2]
A post-hoc test (Tukey’s HSD, p,.05) revealed that the proportion of motion perception was higher in the alternation condition than the other conditions for all the eccentricities, except for 1.25 deg. These results indicate that the alternation of sound location induces the visual motion perception of the static visual stimulus, and the effect of auditory signals became greater with the increment of the eccentricity of the visual stimuli
We demonstrated that a static visual stimulus blinking in one place was perceived to be moving laterally when it was accompanied with the alternation of sound location in the left and right ears
Summary
In order to establish coherent and robust percepts of our surroundings, the perceptual system appropriately and flexibly combines or integrates multisensory inputs [1], depending on the accuracy and/or reliability of each input [2]. In an ambiguous visual motion display where left or right motion perception occurred often, a transient auditory signal captured the temporal positional information of a visual stimulus so that the visual stimulus appeared to move in a certain direction [7]. These studies revealed the modulatory, but not driving or inducing, effects of auditory information on visual motion perception. A visual stimulus blinking at a fixed location was perceived to be moving laterally when its flash onset was synchronized to an alternating left-right sound source We found that this illusory motion could be observed more frequently in peripheral vision where spatial resolutions are lower (see Supplemental Video S1 for a demonstration). We call this phenomenon ‘‘Sound-Induced Visual Motion (SIVM),’’ hereafter
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