Authors: Souta Hidaka Wataru Teramoto Mirjam Keetels Jean Vroomen
Publish Date: 2013/09/13
Volume: 231, Issue: 1, Pages: 117-126
Abstract
The brain tends to associate specific features of stimuli across sensory modalities The pitch of a sound is for example associated with spatial elevation such that higherpitched sounds are felt as being “up” in space and lowerpitched sounds as being “down” Here we investigated whether changes in the pitch of sounds could be effective for visual motion perception similar to those in the location of sounds We demonstrated that only sounds that alternate in up/down location induced illusory vertical motion of a static visual stimulus while sounds that alternate in higher/lower pitch did not induce this illusion The pitch of a sound did not even modulate the visual motion perception induced by sounds alternating in up/down location Interestingly though sounds alternating in higher/lower pitch could become a driver for visual motion if they were paired in a previous exposure phase with vertical visual apparent motion Thus only after prolonged exposure the pitch of a sound became an inducer for upper/lower visual motion This occurred even if during exposure the pitch and location of the sounds were paired in an incongruent fashion These findings indicate that pitch–space correspondence is not so strong to drive or modulate visual motion perception However associative exposure could increase the saliency of pitch–space relationships and then the pitch could induce visual motion perception by itselfWe thank Wouter DH Stumpel for his technical supports We are grateful to anonymous reviewers for their valuable and insightful comments and suggestions for early versions of the manuscript This research was supported by the Ministry of Education Culture Sports Science and Technology GrantinAid for Specially Promoted Research No 19001004 and Rikkyo University Special Fund for Research
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