Effects of Cognitive Expectation on Sound-Induced Flash Illusion

Abstract

Sound-induced flash illusion (SIFI) is an auditory-dominated multisensory integration phenomenon in which flashes presented in conjunction with an unequal number of auditory sounds are illusorily perceived as equal in number to the auditory sounds. Previous studies on the factors that impact SIFI have mainly focused on top-down and bottom-up factors. This study aimed to explore the effects of top-down cognitive expectations on the SIFI by manipulating the proportion of trial types. The results showed that the accuracy of judgment was improved and reaction times were shortened when the instructions were consistent with the actual proportion of trial type. When the instructions were not consistent with the actual proportion of trial types, the instructions could still regulate the accuracy and reaction times in judging the fission illusion (i.e., a brief flash accompanied by two auditory stimuli tends to be perceived as two flashes) regardless of the actual proportion of trial types. The results indicated that top-down cognitive expectations could significantly reduce the fission illusion and accelerate the judgment, but the effect was not significant in the fusion illusion (i.e., two brief flashes accompanied by single auditory stimuli tend to be perceived as a single flash) due to the instability of the illusion.

Urban and rural environments differentially shape multisensory perception in ageing

“…Thus, if an individual's perceptual system expects discontinuous visual input (multiple flashes) and audition is relatively more reliable than vision (perhaps due to better temporal acuity, e.g., Welch et al, 1986), it is likely that participants will report that they saw two flashes when one flash was paired with two beeps. In line with this, Wang et al (2019) showed that if participants were informed that multiple flashes would occur on a higher proportion of trials, illusory responses were more likely to occur.…”

“…The mechanisms by which SIFI is mediated by cognitive functions appear less clear. Whilst the SIFI has been found to be moderated by memory load (Michail & Keil, 2018) and cognitive expectation (Wang et al, 2019) other cognitive manipulations such as attentional orienting do not appear to moderate the illusion. For example, explicitly instructing participants to attend to one or the other modality (Odegaard et al, 2016) and explicit feedback training does not appear to modulate illusion perception (Rosenthal et al, 2009).…”

Double Flash Illusions: Current Findings and Future Directions

“…They argue that their findings provide strong evidence that audiovisual integration can be modulated by the amount of available cognitive resources and it therefore argues against a pre-attentive account of multisensory integration. A recent study examined the influence of expectations regarding the presented stimuli on the perception of the SIFI (Wang et al, 2019). In short, the authors show that expectations regarding the proportion of SIFI trials shape perception, indicating an influence of task-related cognitive processes.…”

“…Recent studies examined the influence of cognitive factors on multisensory integration. However, the role of attention therein is hotly debated (Andersen et al, 2004(Andersen et al, , 2009Talsma et al, 2010;Macaluso et al, 2016;Tang et al, 2016), and the role of expectations for multisensory integration has only recently been examined (Gau and Noppeney, 2015;Wang et al, 2019). Behavioral data suggest that participants can adjust the susceptibility to the SIFI according to the expectations of stimulus timing (Chan et al, 2020).…”

Effects of Repetition Suppression on Sound Induced Flash Illusion With Aging

“…Visual information dominates other sensory modalities more frequently. However, auditory information can also dominate other sensory modalities, especially when temporal information is involved (Repp, 2000(Repp, , 2002Bresciani et al, 2008;Wang et al, 2019). Shams et al (2000) defined a specific phenomenon of information competition, the sound-induced flash illusion (SiFI).…”