Is 9 louder than 1? Audiovisual cross-modal interactions between number magnitude and judged sound loudness

Abstract

The cross-modal impact of number magnitude (i.e. Arabic digits) on perceived sound loudness was examined. Participants compared a target sound's intensity level against a previously heard reference sound (which they judged as quieter or louder). Paired with each target sound was a task irrelevant Arabic digit that varied in magnitude, being either small (1, 2, 3) or large (7, 8, 9). The degree to which the sound and the digit were synchronized was manipulated, with the digit and sound occurring simultaneously in Experiment 1, and the digit preceding the sound in Experiment 2. Firstly, when target sounds and digits occurred simultaneously, sounds paired with large digits were categorized as loud more frequently than sounds paired with small digits. Secondly, when the events were separated, number magnitude ceased to bias sound intensity judgments. In Experiment 3, the events were still separated, however the participants held the number in short-term memory. In this instance the bias returned.

Numerical value biases sound localization

“…However, judgments concerning the location of the preceding number were not examined. A crossmodal study supported the rationale of the current study by showing that visually-presented numbers can influence loudness judgments 33 . In this study we conducted a series of experiments using different protocols, languages, and measurement methods to test the idea that auditory spatial perception along the left-right axis is influenced by long-term memory for number magnitude.…”

“…Thus the timing of early lexical access and auditory spatial representations were congruent, and occurred well before subjects made their response in our experiments. Convergent evidence is provided by a crossmodal task where subjects viewed numbers and rated the loudness of simultaneous sounds 33 . This report not only found an influence of seeing numbers on loudness perception, but also observed that the bias was only evident when visual and auditory stimuli were presented at the same time.…”

Loudness Counts: Interactions between Loudness, Number Magnitude, and Space

“…We chose two levels of loudness difference between the two numbers of a stimulus pair: an easy-to-discriminate loudness difference (20 dB) and a difficult-to-discriminate loudness difference (4 dB). The difficult-to-discriminate condition was chosen to capture a possible effect of number magnitude on the perception of loudness (as shown in Alards-Tomalin, Walker, Shaw, & Leboe-McGowan, 2015). For the large, easy-to-discriminate loudness difference, one number was reduced by 10 dB while the other number was increased by 10 dB.…”

“…Heinemann, Pfister, and Janczyk (2013) found that a loud tone biased participants toward selecting larger numbers in a random number generation task. Moreover, in Alards-Tomalin, Walker, Shaw, and Leboe-McGowan's (2015) study, participants judged whether a target sound was louder or quieter than a reference sound. They found that the magnitude of a task-irrelevant number biased the loudness judgments: When accompanied by a large number, the target sound was categorized more often as louder than when the target sound was accompanied by a small magnitude.…”

The Influence of Number Magnitude on Vocal Responses

“…Regarding the intensity, the ATOM hypothesis (Walsh, 2003) assumes that overlapping sensory-motor processes are responsible for representing magnitude-related dimensions of loudness and number. Indeed, research has revealed that large numbers and increasing number sequences are automatically associated with relatively loud sounds, whereas small numbers and decreasing number sequences are associated with quieter sounds (Alards-Tomalin, Walker, Nepon, & Leboe-McGowan, 2017;Alards-Tomalin, Walker, Shaw, & Leboe-McGowan, 2015). Also, given that large objects in comparison to small objects have been linked to increased intensity of vocal responses (Gentilucci et al, 2009), we assume that the intensity of a vocalization would be lower when categorizing the numbers 1 and 2 in comparison to the numbers 8 and 9.…”