title: Policing Fish at Boston's Museum of Science: Studying Audiovisual Interaction in the Wild.
abstract: Boston's Museum of Science supports researchers whose projects advance science and provide educational opportunities to the Museum's visitors. For our project, 60 visitors to the Museum played "Fish Police!!," a video game that examines audiovisual integration, including the ability to ignore irrelevant sensory information. Players, who ranged in age from 6 to 82 years, made speeded responses to computer-generated fish that swam rapidly across a tablet display. Responses were to be based solely on the rate (6 or 8 Hz) at which a fish's size modulated, sinusoidally growing and shrinking. Accompanying each fish was a task-irrelevant broadband sound, amplitude modulated at either 6 or 8 Hz. The rates of visual and auditory modulation were either Congruent (both 6 Hz or 8 Hz) or Incongruent (6 and 8 or 8 and 6 Hz). Despite being instructed to ignore the sound, players of all ages responded more accurately and faster when a fish's auditory and visual signatures were Congruent. In a controlled laboratory setting, a related task produced comparable results, demonstrating the robustness of the audiovisual interaction reported here. Some suggestions are made for conducting research in public settings.
authors.affiliation: CompNet, Boston University, USA.
authors.forename: Hannah
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Goldberg
authors.affiliation: Psychology, Brandeis University, Waltham, USA.
authors.forename: Yile
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.affiliation: Computer Science, Brandeis University, Waltham, USA.
authors.forename: Timothy J
authors.initials: TJ
authors.lastname: Hickey
authors.affiliation: Biomedical Engineering, Boston University, USA.
authors.forename: Barbara
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Shinn-Cunningham
authors.affiliation: Volen Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis University, Waltham, USA.
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Sekuler
keywords: audiovisual interaction; multisensory; temporal structure; video games