title: A deafening flash! Visual interference of auditory signal detection.
abstract: In some people, visual stimulation evokes auditory sensations. How prevalent and how perceptually real is this? 22% of our neurotypical adult participants responded 'Yes' when asked whether they heard faint sounds accompanying flash stimuli, and showed significantly better ability to discriminate visual 'Morse-code' sequences. This benefit might arise from an ability to recode visual signals as sounds, thus taking advantage of superior temporal acuity of audition. In support of this, those who showed better visual relative to auditory sequence discrimination also had poorer auditory detection in the presence of uninformative visual flashes, though this was independent of awareness of visually-evoked sounds. Thus a visually-evoked auditory representation may occur subliminally and disrupt detection of real auditory signals. The frequent natural correlation between visual and auditory stimuli might explain the surprising prevalence of this phenomenon. Overall, our results suggest that learned correspondences between strongly correlated modalities may provide a precursor for some synaesthetic abilities.
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Neuroscience Research Unit, Department of Psychology, City, University of London, London, UK.
authors.forename: Christopher
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Fassnidge
authors.affiliation: Neuroscience Masters Programme, King's College London, UK.
authors.forename: Claudia
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Cecconi Marcotti
authors.affiliation: Cognitive Neuroscience Research Unit, Department of Psychology, City, University of London, London, UK. Electronic address: elliot.freeman@city.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Elliot
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Freeman
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D017603:Signal Detection, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Audiovisual integration; Individual differences; Perception; Psychophysics; Synaesthesia