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The effect of sound intensity on the audiotactile crossmodal dynamic capture effect

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Abstract

We investigated the effect of varying sound intensity on the audiotactile crossmodal dynamic capture effect. Participants had to discriminate the direction of a target stream (tactile, Experiment 1; auditory, Experiment 2) while trying to ignore the direction of a distractor stream presented in a different modality (auditory, Experiment 1; tactile, Experiment 2). The distractor streams could either be spatiotemporally congruent or incongruent with respect to the target stream. In half of the trials, the participants were presented with auditory stimuli at 75 dB(A) while in the other half of the trials they were presented with auditory stimuli at 82 dB(A). Participants’ performance on both tasks was significantly affected by the intensity of the sounds. Namely, the crossmodal capture of tactile motion by audition was stronger with the more intense (vs. less intense) auditory distractors (Experiment 1), whereas the capture effect exerted by the tactile distractors was stronger for less intense (than for more intense) auditory targets (Experiment 2). The crossmodal dynamic capture was larger in Experiment 1 than in Experiment 2, with a stronger congruency effect when the target streams were presented in the tactile (vs. auditory) modality. Two explanations are put forward to account for these results: an attentional biasing toward the more intense auditory stimuli, and a modulation induced by the relative perceptual weight of, respectively, the auditory and the tactile signals.

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Notes

  1. Ten blindfolded control participants (5 males and 5 females; mean age of 25 years; range from 21 to 31 years) were asked to evaluate whether the auditory stimuli (12 trials presented in the absence of any distractors) presented at the two intensities differed from each other. Six of the participants could not perceive any difference, two perceived a difference, in a dimension other than the one manipulated (i.e., the more intense stimuli were perceived as being “quicker” or “more similar” than the less intense stimuli), one perceived a difference but was unable to verbalize in which way they differed. Only one participant reported having perceived that the stimuli differed in intensity. Thus, the two sound intensities used in the present study did not differ in terms of their perceived loudness.

  2. To test whether the impression of apparent motion could be conveyed by the kind of stimulation utilized in the present study, we asked ten blindfolded control participants (5 males and 5 females; mean age of 25 years; range from 21 to 31 years) to rate the strength of apparent motion following unimodal stimulation (i.e., 12 streams presented in isolation). The mean apparent motion rates were 4.1 (range: 1–6) for the tactile motion, 4.0 (range: 1–6) for the less intense auditory motion, and 4.7 (range: 1–6) for the more intense auditory motion, showing that some impression of motion was present (cf. Sanabria et al. 2005, for similar results). The fact that the impression of apparent motion experienced in the tactile modality was, on average, weaker than that conveyed by the auditory modality (although note that the stimulation was spatiotemporally similar in both modalities) raises a concern about the judgments of tactile motion and, indirectly, on the specific kind of tactile stimulation used in the present study. It is plausible, for instance, that the tactile stimulation typically used in the crossmodal dynamic capture paradigm only conveys a relatively weak impression of apparent motion (see Sanabria et al. 2005, for just such a claim). This may have been due to the fact that only two tactile stimuli were used (the sensation of tactile movement is more likely to be conveyed when a number of stimulators higher than two is used; Kirman 1974) and that they were applied to sites which were not only spatially disparate, but were also located on two different parts (sides) of the body. As in other studies on apparent motion, it has been shown that with sparse tactile stimulation, it is possible that participants could infer the direction of the tactile stream relying on the spatial position and sequence of the stimuli, but actually without experiencing any motion impressions (Lakatos and Shepard 1997). Thus, the possibility that the participants in the present study could have relied on the temporal order of the tactile stimuli instead to the tactile motion cannot be excluded. Next investigations on this topic have thus to involve a different kind of tactile stimulation and/or methods to control for this bias.

  3. In contrast to other studies on auditory and tactile apparent motion that have investigated participants’ impression of motion only informally (cf. Lakatos and Shepard 1997), and previous studies on the crossmodal dynamic capture effect, which did not investigated this topic, we chose to describe the participants’ self-reports about the impression of motion experienced while performing the task. The reasoning behind this choice was twofold, aimed on the one hand at providing a formal measure of the impression of apparent motion vs. succession of tactile stimulation and, on the other, on exploring whether the impression of movement in the different sensory modalities was qualitatively similar. Note, however, that the fact that participants had to provide their ratings after the end of each experimental block means that they had to average out both the impression of apparent motion and of response confidence experienced across all the various trials composing the block. This procedure, although possibly inducing a partial distortion of the judgments, was chosen in order to avoid making the experimental session last too long.

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Acknowledgments

M.Z. was supported by a returning grant “Rientro dei cervelli” from the MURST (Italy).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cognitive Sciences and Education, University of Trento, Corso Bettini, 31, 38068, Rovereto (TN), Italy

    Valeria Occelli & Massimiliano Zampini

  2. Department of Experimental Psychology, Crossmodal Research Laboratory, Oxford University, Oxford, UK

    Valeria Occelli & Charles Spence

  3. Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Rovereto (TN), Italy

    Massimiliano Zampini

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  1. Valeria Occelli
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Correspondence to Valeria Occelli.

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Occelli, V., Spence, C. & Zampini, M. The effect of sound intensity on the audiotactile crossmodal dynamic capture effect. Exp Brain Res 193, 409–419 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-008-1637-9

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