Dear all,
Thank you all very much for your responses.
It seems that there is plenty of literature on the effect
of visual stimuli in auditory localisation. If anyone is
interested, a summary of relevant keywords for this topic
could be: 'visual capture', 'visual dominance', 'visual
bias' and 'cross-modal bias'. Also, one may find relevant
papers under: 'multimodal integration', 'multisensory
integration' and 'cross-modal plasticity'.
I have found that a common practice is to use only one
visual cue and one auditory cue at the same time. If the two
stimuli are close to be spatially congruent, the subject
will probably bind the two of them together unconsciously,
thus causing this 'visual capture' effect in which the
visual stimulus dominates the auditory one. This may not
happen if the two stimuli are not spatially congruent in a
noticeable way [1, 2].
However, in the scenario that I proposed originally there
are two auditory stimuli: one of them is explicitly
associated to the visual cue and would act as an 'anchor',
while the other one has to be located. Intuitively, one
might think that if the two auditory cues are perceived as
different sources, the risk of visual dominance should be
small.
As it has been pointed out, another part of the question
is on 'relative localisation' and comparative judgements,
particularly in multimodal scenarios. How good are we at
estimating the location of two sound sources with respect to
each other? And what happens if we introduce visual cues?
All suggestions are welcome! Thank you all again for your
contributions.
Kind regards,
Isaac Engel
References:
[1] Bosen, Adam K. et al. 2016. “Comparison of Congruence
Judgment and Auditory Localization Tasks for Assessing the
Spatial Limits of Visual Capture.” Biological Cybernetics
110(6): 455–71
[2] Berger, Christopher C., et al. "Generic HRTFs may be
good enough in Virtual Reality. Improving source
localization through cross-modal plasticity." Frontiers in
Neuroscience 12 (2018): 21.
From: Engel Alonso-Martinez,
Isaac
Sent: 24 February 2018 19:08
To: auditory@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Visual references in sound localisation
I am interested in the impact of audible
visual references in sound localisation tasks.
For instance, let's say that you are
presented two different continuous sounds (e.g.,
speech) coming from sources A and B, which are
in different locations. While source A is
clearly visible to you, B is invisible and you
are asked to estimate its location. Will source
A act as a spatial reference, helping you in
doing a more accurate estimation, or will it be
distracting and make the task more difficult?
If anyone can point to some literature on
this, it would be greatly appreciated.