ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.

Sec. Perception Science

Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1522618

This article is part of the Research TopicCrossing Sensory Boundaries: Multisensory Perception Through the Lens of AuditionView all 12 articles

Examining Auditory Modulations on Detecting and Pooling Visual Global Motion

Provisionally accepted
Yi-Chuan  ChenYi-Chuan Chen1Ang-Ke  KuAng-Ke Ku2Pi-Chun  HuangPi-Chun Huang2*
  • 1Department of Medicine, Mackay Medical College, New Taipei, Taiwan
  • 2Department of Psychology, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Tainan County, Taiwan

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Multisensory signals often interact to reduce perceptual uncertainty in the environment. However, the effects and mechanisms underlying audiovisual interactions in motion perception remain unclear. In this study, we adopted the method of constant stimuli and the equivalent noise paradigm to investigate whether and how auditory motion influences the perception of visual global motion. The visual stimuli consisted of dots moving either up-left or up-right, with motion directions sampled from a normal distribution at five levels of standard deviation. The auditory stimuli were white noise moving either laterally (leftward or rightward; Experiment 1) or diagonally (up-left or up-right; Experiment 2), forming a coarse congruent or incongruent directional relationship with the visual motion trajectories. Stationary and no-sound conditions were also included. The auditory signals were task-irrelevant and presented in spatial proximity to, but not fully overlapping with, the visual stimuli. Participants had to discriminate the direction of the visual global motion. After accounting for or eliminating the bias induced by auditory motion at the decisional level, the thresholds of visual motion perception were found to be similar across the four auditory conditions. Further analysis using the equivalent noise model confirmed that auditory motion did not influence the detection or pooling of visual motion signals. Hence, we did not find evidence to support the notion that auditory motion modulates the sensory or perceptual processing of visual global motion, delineating a boundary condition for such crossmodal interactions.

Keywords: multisensory processing, audiovisual interactions, equivalent noise paradigm, internal noise, Sampling efficiency, Response bias

Received: 04 Nov 2024; Accepted: 04 Jun 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Chen, Ku and Huang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Pi-Chun Huang, Department of Psychology, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, 70101, Tainan County, Taiwan

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