Apparent causality affects perceived simultaneity

Abstract

The present research addresses the question of how visual predictive information and implied causality affect audio-visual synchrony perception. Previous research has shown a systematic shift in the likelihood of observers to accept audio-leading stimulus pairs as being apparently simultaneous in variants of audio-visual stimulus pairs that differ in (1) the amount of visual predictive information available and (2) the apparent causal relation between the auditory and visual components. An experiment was designed to separate the predictability and causality explanations, and the results indicated that shifts in subjective simultaneity were explained completely by changes in the implied causal relations in the stimuli and that predictability had no added value. Together with earlier findings, these results further indicate that the observed shifts in subjective simultaneity due to causal relations among auditory and visual events do not reflect a mere change in response strategy, but rather result from early multimodal integration processes in event perception.