title: Alternation of sound location induces visual motion perception of a static object.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Audition provides important cues with regard to stimulus motion although vision may provide the most salient information. It has been reported that a sound of fixed intensity tends to be judged as decreasing in intensity after adaptation to looming visual stimuli or as increasing in intensity after adaptation to receding visual stimuli. This audiovisual interaction in motion aftereffects indicates that there are multimodal contributions to motion perception at early levels of sensory processing. However, there has been no report that sounds can induce the perception of visual motion.
  
  
  RESULTS
  A visual stimulus blinking at a fixed location was perceived to be moving laterally when the flash onset was synchronized to an alternating left-right sound source. This illusory visual motion was strengthened with an increasing retinal eccentricity (2.5 deg to 20 deg) and occurred more frequently when the onsets of the audio and visual stimuli were synchronized.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  We clearly demonstrated that the alternation of sound location induces illusory visual motion when vision cannot provide accurate spatial information. The present findings strongly suggest that the neural representations of auditory and visual motion processing can bias each other, which yields the best estimates of external events in a complementary manner.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Graduate School of Arts and Letters, Tohoku University, Sendai, Miyagi, Japan. hidaka@sal.tohoku.ac.jp
authors.forename: Souta
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Hidaka
authors.forename: Yuko
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Manaka
authors.forename: Wataru
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Teramoto
authors.forename: Yoichi
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Sugita
authors.forename: Ryota
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Miyauchi
authors.forename: Jiro
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Gyoba
authors.forename: Yôiti
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Suzuki
authors.forename: Yukio
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Iwaya
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D006801:Humans; D009039:Motion Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D013016:Sound