The interconnection of binaural and stereoscopic cues for distance perception

Abstract

Encountering objects within our three-dimensional environment is a combination of sensory cues. While much research has been conducted on how the auditory and visual systems singularly locate objects in space, studies in cross-modal interaction of these two systems suggest the overall perception of a stimulus cannot fully be described by a single sensory system. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between visual and acoustic cues specifically in understanding depth perception. Previous studies of audio-visual interaction of spatial perception have accounted for many different auditory depth cues, but have not fully cross examined a number of visual depth cues. Participants were asked to determine the egocentric distance of a stimulus in a virtual three dimensional environment in terms of real-size quantitative scale. Stimuli were presented as either audio only, visual only, or audio and visual. The single-modal and multi-modal results were analyzed and compared against the null hypothesis that when presented simultaneously, the visual depth cues dominate the distance judgment and the acoustic depth cues have no bearing. In this study, the null hypothesis was not rejected, in accord with previous research investigating the proximity image effect.