Auditory Motion Elicits a Visual Motion Aftereffect

Abstract

The visual motion aftereffect is a visual illusion in which exposure to continuous motion in one direction leads to a subsequent illusion of visual motion in the opposite direction. Previous findings have been mixed with regard to whether this visual illusion can be induced cross-modally by auditory stimuli. Based on research on multisensory perception demonstrating the profound influence auditory perception can have on the interpretation and perceived motion of visual stimuli, we hypothesized that exposure to auditory stimuli with strong directional motion cues should induce a visual motion aftereffect. Here, we demonstrate that horizontally moving auditory stimuli induced a significant visual motion aftereffect—an effect that was driven primarily by a change in visual motion perception following exposure to leftward moving auditory stimuli. This finding is consistent with the notion that visual and auditory motion perception rely on at least partially overlapping neural substrates.

Shared Representation of Visual and Auditory Motion Directions in the Human Middle-Temporal Cortex

“…audition in hMT + /V5 provide evidence that hMT + /V5 may play a crucial role in providing a common representational structure between the two modalities to link auditory and visual motion-direction information. The presence of a common brain code for directional motion in vision and audition might potentially relate to psychophysical studies showing cross-modal adaptation effects for motion directions [49][50][51].…”

“…These results suggest that, whereas the right hMT + /V5 may contain information about auditory motion directions, the main auditory motion selective region (PT) does not reciprocally contain information about visual motion directions, at least in our dataset. Such a difference in the presence of cross-modal information in regions typically preferring visual or auditory motion signals may relate to the fact that vision typically plays a dominant role in discriminating motion information [49,45,52,53]. It may therefore be speculated that the regions typically providing the most reliable sensory signal for discriminating motion directions (i.e., vision) are more likely to also represents cross-modal signals [54,55].…”

Generic HRTFs May be Good Enough in Virtual Reality. Improving Source Localization through Cross-Modal Plasticity

“…Kitagawa and Ichihara ( 2002 ) found that repeatedly viewing visual objects moving in depth led to an auditory aftereffect in which spatially static sounds were miss-perceived as moving in the opposite direction (Kitagawa and Ichihara, 2002 ). Together, the findings presented above highlight the highly adaptable nature of the auditory system, and the importance of vision in shaping acoustic perception (cf., Berger and Ehrsson, 2016 ). Given the known plasticity of the auditory system, and the importance of vision in generating rapid changes in acoustic perception, research and development of HRTFs in VR could be significantly improved by applying some of these basic principles of human sensory perception.…”

Splitting time: Sound-induced illusory visual temporal fission and fusion.

“…The reason behind the preservation of the strength of the illusion compared to the weaker form of temporal fission may have something to do with auditory apparent motion. There is evidence to suggest that the perception of auditory and visual motion share, or partially share, neural substrates (Berger & Ehrsson, 2016). It is conceivable that the presentation of a tone to one ear followed by the other would induce similar processes to that of auditory apparent motion.…”