Abstract
Each year thousands of people are killed by looming motor vehicles. Throughout our evolutionary history looming objects have posed a threat to survival and perceptual systems have evolved unique solutions to confront these environmental challenges. Vision provides an accurate representation of time-to-contact with a looming object and usually allows us to interact successfully with the object if required. However, audition functions as a warning system and yields an anticipatory representation of arrival time, indicating that the object has arrived when it is still some distance away. The bias provides a temporal margin of safety that allows more time to initiate defensive actions. In two studies this bias was shown to influence the perception of the speed of looming and receding sound sources. Listeners heard looming and receding sound sources and judged how fast they were moving. Listeners perceived the speed of looming sounds as faster than that of equivalent receding sounds. Listeners also showed better discrimination of the speed of looming sounds than receding sounds. Finally, close sounds were perceived as faster than distant sounds. The results suggest a prioritization of the perception of the speed of looming and receding sounds that mirrors the level of threat posed by moving objects in the environment.
Highlights
In the five-year period from 2009 to 2013, over 20,000 pedestrians were killed in the United States by moving motor vehicles (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 2015)
Throughout our evolutionary history, looming objects have been a similar source of potential danger and perceptual systems have evolved in advantageous ways to deal with such threats
A 2 (Direction) × 2 (Distance) × 3 (Speed) Repeated-Measures Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) revealed a main effect for Direction indicating that looming sounds (M = 39.1, SE = 2.3) were perceived as moving significantly faster than receding sounds (M = 32.2, SE = 2.3), F (1,76) = 17.8, p < 0.001, ηp2 = 0.19
Summary
In the five-year period from 2009 to 2013, over 20,000 pedestrians were killed in the United States by moving motor vehicles (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 2015). Throughout our evolutionary history, looming objects have been a similar source of potential danger and perceptual systems have evolved in advantageous (though not perfect) ways to deal with such threats. Audition is useful under these conditions and typically functions as a warning system that gives an added measure of safety in dealing with looming objects (Guski, 1992; Rosenblum, Carello, & Pastore, 1987; Rosenblum, Wuestefeld, & Saldana, 1993). Looming sounds initiate a series of protective physiological, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses that do not occur in response to sounding objects that move in any other direction. Compared to equivalent receding sounds, looming sounds preferentially activate the amygdala and a distributed neural network that supports attention, auditory space and motion perception, and motor planning—all responses indicative of an adaptive trait that has evolved to keep
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
