Cross modal Integration: The search for unity

Contrary to the predictions of established theory, Schutz and Lipscomb (2007) have documented a musical illusion in which visual information influences the perceived duration of concurrent sounds. This illusion is at odds with previous work on sensory integration demonstrating that vision does not influence auditory judgments of event duration (Walker & Scott, 1981; Welch & Warren, 1980). Recent work has shown that causality plays a key role in the illusion, and suggests that tone envelope is crucial in triggering the perception of cross-modal causal links (Schutz & Kubovy, in press). This series of experiments focuses explicitly on tone envelope, exploring its importance in organizing multi-modal information into a coherent perceptual experience. The results demonstrate that exponentially decaying (also known as "percussive" or "damped") envelopes trigger a form of audio-visual binding not observed in previous research – which generally focuses on sounds using flat envelopes. This privileged binding allows vision to influence auditory perception of tone duration, but has no effect on the degree to which audition influences the visual perception of motion duration. Michael Schutz The search for unity p.

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