No effect of synesthetic congruency on temporal ventriloquism

By Mirjam Keetels, Jean H. M. Vroomen. 2010

28 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A sound presented in temporal proximity to a light can alter the perceived temporal occurrence of that light (temporal ventriloquism). Recent studies have suggested that pitch–size synesthetic congruency (i.e., a natural association between the relative pitch of a sound and the relative size of a visual stimulus) might affect this phenomenon. To reexamine this, participants made temporal order judgements about small- and large-sized visual stimuli while high- or low-pitched tones were presented before the first and after the second light. We replicated a previous study showing that, at large sound–light intervals, sensitivity for visual temporal order was better for synesthetically congruent than for incongruent pairs. However, this congruency effect could not be attributed to temporal ventriloquism, since it disappeared at short sound–light intervals, if compared with a synchronous audiovisual baseline condition that excluded response biases. In addition, synesthetic congruency did not affect temporal ventriloquism even if participants were made explicitly aware of congruency before testing. Our results thus challenge the view that synesthetic congruency affects temporal ventriloquism.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Sensory Systems, Social Psychology

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Assessing the Role of the ‘Unity Assumption’ on Multisensory Integration: A Review (2017, background): “Vatakis and Spence (2007) suggested that the presentation of the matched speech stimuli may have resulted in more temporal ventriloquism (e.g., Morein-Zamir et al., 2003) than was the case for the mismatched stimuli (see also Parise and Spence, 2008; though see Keetels and Vroomen, 2011).”