Volume 9, Number 12, Article 4, Pages 1-8 doi:10.1167/9.12.4 http://journalofvision.org/9/12/4/ ISSN 1534-7362
The sliding window of audio–visual simultaneity
Warrick Roseboom
School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
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Shin'ya Nishida
NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Nippon, Telegraph & Telephone Corporation, Kanagawa, Japan
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Derek H. Arnold
School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
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Abstract

Humans exist in an environment wherein many unrelated events occur in close spatial and temporal proximity. Audio–visual timing experiments, however, have often examined only isolated pairs of sensory events. We therefore decided to assess how audio–visual timing perception would be shaped by the presence of an additional audio or visual event. We found that the point of subjective synchrony for a sensory event can be shifted away from the presence of other temporally proximate events. These interactions made audio–visual pairs seem unrelated, or asynchronous, at timings at which they had seemed synchronous when presented in isolation. This shows that the interval across which humans are insensitive to audio–visual asynchrony is not fixed, but dynamic, shaped by interactions between multiple sensory events. Importantly, we establish that these interactions can enhance the sensitivity of timing judgments. These interactions could therefore help to segregate unrelated sensory events across time. Such effects are likely to be common in the cluttered environments in which humans exist.

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History
Received April 22, 2009; published November 10, 2009
Citation
Roseboom, W., Nishida, S., & Arnold, D. H. (2009). The sliding window of audio–visual simultaneity. Journal of Vision, 9(12):4, 1-8, http://journalofvision.org/9/12/4/, doi:10.1167/9.12.4.
Keywords
timing perception, audio–visual, perceptual segregation, sensory integration, audio–visual simultaneity window
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