Abstract
In this article, we show that visual distance perception (VDP) is influenced by the auditory environmental context through reverberation-related cues. We performed two VDP experiments in two dark rooms with extremely different reverberation times: an anechoic chamber and a reverberant room. Subjects assigned to the reverberant room perceived the targets farther than subjects assigned to the anechoic chamber. Also, we found a positive correlation between the maximum perceived distance and the auditorily perceived room size. We next performed a second experiment in which the same subjects of Experiment 1 were interchanged between rooms. We found that subjects preserved the responses from the previous experiment provided they were compatible with the present perception of the environment; if not, perceived distance was biased towards the auditorily perceived boundaries of the room. Results of both experiments show that the auditory environment can influence VDP, presumably through reverberation cues related to the perception of room size.
Highlights
Visual perception of egocentric distance to an object has been studied since Leonardo da Vinci’s times[1] until nowadays, where it remains the subject of both numerous and various studies
We found that targets located at D = 5 and 6 m were perceived farther in the reverberant room than in the anechoic chamber [5 m: t(37) = 2.76, p = 0.0045 < 0.01, mean ratio = 1.12; 6 m: t(37) = 2.39, p = 0.011 < 0.02, mean ratio = 1.10; both comparisons held their significance after applying the Holm-Bonferroni multiple-comparisons correction[52], see Methods]
In Experiment 1, participants placed in the reverberant room perceived all the targets farther than those placed in the anechoic chamber
Summary
Visual perception of egocentric distance to an object (visual distance perception or VDP) has been studied since Leonardo da Vinci’s times[1] until nowadays, where it remains the subject of both numerous and various studies. When visual cues are restricted (for instance, by reducing ambient illumination), perception becomes less accurate[20, 21] This last result suggests that the information provided by the place where the subject and the target are located, which we call “environmental-context information”, can influence the perception of objects and events presented within it. Sensory combination refers to the processing of information regarding complementary (non-redundant) aspects of the observed environmental property: in this case, information provided by the environment, the surrounding objects, and by prior knowledge, among others These sources of information are collected aiming to reduce the inherent incompleteness of our perception of the world. This kind of integration has been demonstrated for visual-proprioceptive[40], visual-tactile[41] and visual-haptic[42] interactions
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