Abstract
Boston's Museum of Science supports researchers whose projects advance science and provide educational opportunities to the Museum's visitors. For our project, 60 visitors to the Museum played “Fish Police!!,” a video game that examines audiovisual integration, including the ability to ignore irrelevant sensory information. Players, who ranged in age from 6 to 82 years, made speeded responses to computer-generated fish that swam rapidly across a tablet display. Responses were to be based solely on the rate (6 or 8 Hz) at which a fish's size modulated, sinusoidally growing and shrinking. Accompanying each fish was a task-irrelevant broadband sound, amplitude modulated at either 6 or 8 Hz. The rates of visual and auditory modulation were either Congruent (both 6 Hz or 8 Hz) or Incongruent (6 and 8 or 8 and 6 Hz). Despite being instructed to ignore the sound, players of all ages responded more accurately and faster when a fish's auditory and visual signatures were Congruent. In a controlled laboratory setting, a related task produced comparable results, demonstrating the robustness of the audiovisual interaction reported here. Some suggestions are made for conducting research in public settings.
Highlights
For more than a century, researchers have occasionally collected psychophysical data outside the laboratory, in public or quasi-public settings
For indices of audiovisual integration, we contrasted players’ performance with Congruent fish to their performance with Incongruent fish, using as metrics the proportion of categorizations that were correct, and the latency of response on correct trials; 60 test participants completed the entire 5-minute game; their ages ranged from 82 years down to 6 years, the youngest age we had permission to test
The 60 fish each player saw and heard were uniformly distributed across four categories defined by the two species of fish, crossed with two types of congruence (Congruent audiovisual signals and Incongruent audiovisual signals)
Summary
For more than a century, researchers have occasionally collected psychophysical data outside the laboratory, in public or quasi-public settings. In our video game, ‘‘Fish Police!!,’’ players watched as computer-generated fish appeared one at a time and swam rapidly across a virtual river (see Figure 1).
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