The stability of visual–aerotactile effects across multiple presentations of a single token

Abstract

Previous research has shown that the sensation of airflow causes bilabial stop closures to be perceived as aspirated even when paired with silent articulations rather than an acoustic signal [Bicevskis et al. 2016, JASA 140(5): 3531–3539]. However, some evidence suggests that perceivers integrate this cue differently if the silent articulations come from an animated face [Keough et al. 2017, Canadian Acoustics 45(3):176–177] rather than a human one. Participants shifted from a strong initial /ba/ bias to a strong /pa/ bias by the second half of the experiment, suggesting the participants learned to associate the video with the aspirated articulation through experience with the airflow. One explanation for the above findings is methodological: participants saw a single video clip while previous work exposed participants to multiple videos. The current study reports two experiments using a single clip with a human face (originally from Bicevskis et al. 2016). We found no evidence of a bias shift, indicating that the findings reported by Keough et al. are not attributable to the use of a single video. Instead, our findings suggest that aero-tactile cues shift consonant perception regardless of the number of recordings presented as long as the speaking face is human.