Assessing the effects of audiovisual semantic congruency on the perception of a bistable figure

详细信息	查看全文 | 推荐本文 |

• 作者：Jhih-Yun Hsiao^a ; Yi-Chuan Chen^b ; ^c ; Charles Spence^b ; Su-Ling Yeh^a ; ^{suling@ntu.edu.tw}
• 关键词：Bistable perception ; Crossmodal semantic congruency ; Fixation ; Attention ; Visual consciousness
• 刊名：Consciousness and Cognition
• 出版年：2012
• 期刊代码：127_10538100
• 类别：cp
• 出版时间：June, 2012
• 卷：21
• 期：2
• 页码：775-787
• 文件大小：870 K

摘要

Bistable figures provide a fascinating window through which to explore human visual awareness. Here we demonstrate for the first time that the semantic context provided by a background auditory soundtrack (the voice of a young or old female) can modulate an observer鈥檚 predominant percept while watching the bistable 鈥渕y wife or my mother-in-law鈥?figure (Experiment 1). The possibility of a response-bias account鈥攖hat participants simply reported the percept that happened to be congruent with the soundtrack that they were listening to鈥攚as excluded in Experiment 2. We further demonstrate that this crossmodal semantic effect was additive with the manipulation of participants鈥?visual fixation (Experiment 3), while it interacted with participants鈥?voluntary attention (Experiment 4). These results indicate that audiovisual semantic congruency constrains the visual processing that gives rise to the conscious perception of bistable visual figures. Crossmodal semantic context therefore provides an important mechanism contributing to the emergence of visual awareness.