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Audition dominates for timingVision doesn't always dominate. Watch Ladan Shams's "Sound-induced Illusory Flashing" movies at Caltec (http://neuro.caltech.edu/~lshams/demo.html; QuickTime).1 They show a black dot flashing very briefly on a white background. The only difference between the movie on the left and the movie on the right is the sound played along with the flash of the dot. With one set you hear a beep as the dot appears; with another set you hear two beeps.
Notice how the sound affects what you see. Two beeps cause the dot not to flash but to appear to flicker. Our visual system isn't so sure it is seeing just one event, and the evidence from hearing is allowed to distort the visual impression that our brain delivers for conscious experience. When the experiment was originally run, people were played up to four beeps with a single flash. For anything more than one beep, people consistently experienced more than one flash. Aschersleben and Bertelson2 demonstrated that the same principle applied when people produced timed movements by tapping. People tapping in time with visual signals were distracted by mistimed sound signals, whereas people tapping in time with sound signals weren't as distracted by mistimed visual signals. How It Works This kind of dominance is really a bias. When the visual information about timing is ambiguous enough, it can be distorted in our experience by the auditory information. And vice versawhen auditory information about location is ambiguous enough, it is biased in the direction of the information provided by visual information. Sometimes that distortion is enough to make it seem as if one sense completely dominates the other. Information from the nondominant sense (vision for timing, audition for location) does influence what result the other sense delivers up to consciousness but not nearly so much. The exact circumstances of the visual-auditory event can affect the size of the bias too. For example, when judging location, the weighting you give to visual information is proportional to the brightness of the light and inversely proportional to the loudness of the sound.3 Nevertheless, the bias is always weighted toward using vision for location and toward audition for timing. The weighting our brain gives to information from these two senses is a result of the design of our senses, so you can't change around the order of dominance by making sounds easier to localize or by making lights harder to locate. Even if you make the sound location-perfect, people watching are still going to prefer to experience what they see as where they see it, and they'll disregard your carefully localized sounds. End Notes 1. Shams, L., Kamitani, Y., & Shimojo, S. (2000). What you see is what you hear. Nature, 408, 788. 2. Aschersleben, G., & Bertelson, P. (2003). Temporal ventriloquism: crossmodal interaction on the time dimension: 2. Evidence from synchronization. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 50(1-2), 157-63. 3. Radeau, M. (1985). Signal intensity, task context, and auditory-visual interactions. Perception, 14, 571-577. See Also · Recanzone, G. H. (2003). Auditory influences on visual temporal rate perception. Journal of Neurophysiology, 89, 1078-1093. · The advice in this hack, and other good tips for design can be found in Reeves et al. (2004). Guidelines for multimodal user interface design. Communications of the ACMSpecial Issue on Multimodal Interfaces, 47(1), 57-59. It is online at http://www.niceproject.com/publications/CACM04.pdf. |
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Hack 54. Don't Divide Attention Across Locations
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Date: 2015-12-11; view: 681
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