Audiovisual Delay as a Novel Cue to Visual Distance.
For audiovisual sensory events, sound arrives with a delay relative to light that increases with event distance. It is unknown, however, whether humans can use these ubiquitous sound delays as an information source for distance computation. Here, we tested the hypothesis that audiovisual delays can both bias and improve human perceptual distance discrimination, such that visual stimuli paired with auditory delays are perceived as more distant and are thereby an ordinal distance cue. In two experiments, participants judged the relative distance of two repetitively displayed three-dimensional dot clusters, both presented with sounds of varying delays. In the first experiment, dot clusters presented with a sound delay were judged to be more distant than dot clusters paired with equivalent sound leads. In the second experiment, we confirmed that the presence of a sound delay was sufficient to cause stimuli to appear as more distant. Additionally, we found that ecologically congruent pairing of more distant events with a sound delay resulted in an increase in the precision of distance judgments. A control experiment determined that the sound delay duration influencing these distance judgments was not detectable, thereby eliminating decision-level influence. In sum, we present evidence that audiovisual delays can be an ordinal cue to visual distance.
Center for Visual Science and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, United States of America.
Philip
P
Jaekl
Center for Visual Science and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, United States of America; Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, United States of America.
Jakob
J
Seidlitz
Centre for Vision Research and Departments of Psychology, Biology and Kinesiology, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Laurence R
LR
Harris
Center for Visual Science and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, United States of America; Department of Ophthalmology, University of Rochester School of Medicine, Rochester, New York, United States of America.
Duje
D
Tadin
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D004215:Distance Perception / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult