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      Crossmodal correspondences: A tutorial review

      Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics
      Springer Science and Business Media LLC

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          Abstract

          In many everyday situations, our senses are bombarded by many different unisensory signals at any given time. To gain the most veridical, and least variable, estimate of environmental stimuli/properties, we need to combine the individual noisy unisensory perceptual estimates that refer to the same object, while keeping those estimates belonging to different objects or events separate. How, though, does the brain "know" which stimuli to combine? Traditionally, researchers interested in the crossmodal binding problem have focused on the roles that spatial and temporal factors play in modulating multisensory integration. However, crossmodal correspondences between various unisensory features (such as between auditory pitch and visual size) may provide yet another important means of constraining the crossmodal binding problem. A large body of research now shows that people exhibit consistent crossmodal correspondences between many stimulus features in different sensory modalities. For example, people consistently match high-pitched sounds with small, bright objects that are located high up in space. The literature reviewed here supports the view that crossmodal correspondences need to be considered alongside semantic and spatiotemporal congruency, among the key constraints that help our brains solve the crossmodal binding problem.

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          Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions.

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              The ventriloquist effect results from near-optimal bimodal integration.

              Ventriloquism is the ancient art of making one's voice appear to come from elsewhere, an art exploited by the Greek and Roman oracles, and possibly earlier. We regularly experience the effect when watching television and movies, where the voices seem to emanate from the actors' lips rather than from the actual sound source. Originally, ventriloquism was explained by performers projecting sound to their puppets by special techniques, but more recently it is assumed that ventriloquism results from vision "capturing" sound. In this study we investigate spatial localization of audio-visual stimuli. When visual localization is good, vision does indeed dominate and capture sound. However, for severely blurred visual stimuli (that are poorly localized), the reverse holds: sound captures vision. For less blurred stimuli, neither sense dominates and perception follows the mean position. Precision of bimodal localization is usually better than either the visual or the auditory unimodal presentation. All the results are well explained not by one sense capturing the other, but by a simple model of optimal combination of visual and auditory information.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics
                Atten Percept Psychophys
                Springer Science and Business Media LLC
                1943-3921
                1943-393X
                May 2011
                January 19 2011
                May 2011
                : 73
                : 4
                : 971-995
                Article
                10.3758/s13414-010-0073-7
                21264748
                304b48ae-eab5-48e6-a6ce-cb536a6175ee
                © 2011

                http://www.springer.com/tdm

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