title: High-intensity sound increases the size of visually perceived objects.
abstract: The effect of audiovisual interactions on size perception has yet to be examined, despite its fundamental importance in daily life. Previous studies have reported that object length can be estimated solely on the basis of the sounds produced when an object is dropped. Moreover, it has been shown that people typically and easily perceive the correspondence between object sizes and sound intensities. It is therefore possible that auditory stimuli may act as cues for object size, thereby altering the visual perception of size. Thus, in the present study we examined the effects of auditory stimuli on the visual perception of size. Specifically, we investigated the effects of the sound intensity of auditory stimuli, the temporal window of audiovisual interactions, and the effects of the retinal eccentricity of visual stimuli. The results indicated that high-intensity auditory stimuli increased visually perceived object size, and that this effect was especially strong in the peripheral visual field. Additional consideration indicated that this effect on the visual perception of size is induced when the cue reliability is relatively higher for the auditory than for the visual stimuli. In addition, we further suggest that the cue reliabilities of visual and auditory stimuli relate to retinal eccentricity and sound intensity, respectively.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Graduate School of Arts & Letters, Tohoku University, Kawauchi 27-1, Sendai 980-8576, Japan. yasuhiro.takeshima@gmail.com
authors.forename: Yasuhiro
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Takeshima
authors.forename: Jiro
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Gyoba
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012858:Size Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013016:Sound