Disentangling Perceptual and Cognitive Explanations for Auditory-Induced Bouncing

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Christian Frings; Professor Dr. Hauke Meyerhoff
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 428932406

An elementary component of human perception is the identification of objects over time. Without establishing this so-called object correspondence, our visual experience would likely be incoherent, with objects popping into and out of existence haphazardly. Beyond purely visual information, cross-modal information has also been shown to alter the perceived correspondence. Perceptual as well as cognitive explanations for the cross-modal impact on visual object correspondence have been proposed, but no decisive evidence in favor of one or the other has been obtained to date. In the proposed experiments, we therefore investigate variations of the bouncing/streaming paradigm (an ambiguous display which could be interpreted as two discs streaming past each other as well as two discs bouncing off each other) in order to disentangle perceptual and cognitive explanations for the resulting visual impression. In this display, the simultaneous presentation of a tone or vibrotactile stimulation at the central moment of overlap alters to dominant impression from streaming to bouncing.In order to disentangle perceptual and cognitive processes for perceived bouncing systematically, we will pursue four complimentary research strategies. In the first working package, we plan to investigate whether bouncing impressions could be elicited under circumstances that render cognitive processing unlikely. In the second work package, we aim to evaluate whether there is a perceptual explanation for the most prominent argument in favor of the cognitive processing – the effect of semantic congruency between the coinciding sounds and naturalistic bouncing events. In the third work package, we intend to probe whether perceptual and cognitive processes contribute to the visual impression of the discs bouncing off each other beyond the manipulations within the bouncing/streaming paradigm. To do so, we aim to study the relation between perceived bouncing and the temporal window of audio-visual integration as well as the effects of the stimulation of cognitive areas on the reported bouncing impressions. The major reason why it is so difficult to distinguish between perceptual and cognitive explanations arises from the rather explicit dependent variable which is vulnerable to both processes. In the forth work package, we therefore aim to investigate whether a less direct audio-visual illusion (a quantitative change in the perceived overlap between the discs) is capable of explaining the shift in the visual impression from streaming to bouncing. From combining these approaches, we expect to gain systematic insights into the contribution of perceptual and cognitive processes when establishing object correspondence.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants