Sound-induced flash illusion as an optimal percept

By Ladan Shams, Wei Ji Ma, Ulrik R Beierholm. 2005

281 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recently, it has been shown that visual perception can be radically altered by signals of other modalities. For example, when a single flash is accompanied by multiple auditory beeps, it is often perceived as multiple flashes. This effect is known as the sound-induced flash illusion. In order to investigate the principles underlying this illusion, we developed an ideal observer (derived using Bayes' rule), and compared human judgements with those of the ideal observer for this task. The human observer's performance was highly consistent with that of the ideal observer in all conditions ranging from no interaction, to partial integration, to complete integration, suggesting that the rule used by the nervous system to decide when and how to combine auditory and visual signals is statistically optimal. Our findings show that the sound-induced flash illusion is an epiphenomenon of this general, statistically optimal strategy.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, 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): “…to the observer’s experience, the priors may also reflect hardwired biases imposed by the physiology and anatomy of the brain (e.g., the pattern of interconnectivity between the sensory areas), as well as biases imposed by the task, the observer’s state, etc.” (Shams et al., 2005, p. 1924).”
Bayesian priors are encoded independently from likelihoods in human multisensory perception. (2009, background): “…perception, not confined to integration but spanning the entire range from integration to segregation, is remarkably consistent with a Bayesian observer performing causal inference (Körding et al., 2007, see also Bresciani, Dammeier, & Ernst, 2006; Roach, Heron, & McGraw, 2006; Shams et al., 2005).”
Probability Matching as a Computational Strategy Used in Perception (2010, result): “Previous studies have investigated whether performance in perceptual tasks is consistent with normative models that use maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) [3–5], Bayesian inference [6–8], signal detection theory [9–11], or other computational frameworks.”
Sound alters activity in human V1 in association with illusory visual perception (2006, background): “For the particular multisensory illusion reported here, visual-evoked potentials and fields associated with the illusory perception are modified at a short latency (Bhattacharya et al., 2002; Shams et al., 2001, 2005 ) consistent with generators in early visual cortex.”
Humans' Multisensory Perception, from Integration to Segregation, Follows Bayesian Inference (2011, methodology): “Humans are almost always surrounded by multiple objects, and therefore multiple sources of sensory stimulation.”
Multisensory integration: current issues from the perspective of the single neuron (2008, unknown): “Often this is accomplished by weighting the various cues based on how much information they are likely to provide about a given even”
The Brain’s Tendency to Bind Audiovisual Signals Is Stable but Not General (2016, unknown): “On a given day, each subject participated in two tasks: a temporal-numerosity judgment task (Shams et al., 2000, 2005) and a spatial localization task (Körding et al., 2007; Wozny et al., 2010).”
Knowledge about a Common Source Can Promote Visual — Haptic Integration (2007, background): “Recently Ernst (2005) reported a Bayesian model that formalised this continuum between independence and fusion by incorporating prior knowledge about object identity which he called the coupling prior (see also Bresciani et al 2006; Roach et al 2006; Shams et al 2005).”
Multisensory Causal Inference in the Brain (2015, background): “However, the brain mechanisms underlying multisensory perception in everyday tasks can probably only be understood by considering both the integration and causal inference problems [9].”
Causal Inference in Multisensory Perception (2007, methodology): “Very good fits to human performance have been shown for the combination of two cues [13,14,17,18].”