Audition is accepted as more reliable (thus dominant) than vision when temporal discrimination is required by the task. However, it is not known whether the characteristics of the visual stimulus, for example its familiarity to the perceiver, affect auditory dominance. In this study we manipulated familiarity of the visual stimulus in a well-established multisensory phenomenon, i.e., the sound-...

The dependency of the perceived intensity of a short stimulus on its duration is well established in vision and audition. No such phenomenon has been reported for the tactile modality. In this study naive observers were presented with pink noise vibrations enveloped in a Gabor wavelet. Characteristic durations ranging between 100 and 700 ms and intensities ranging from 0.3 and 3.0 10−3 m/s were...

Audition--what listeners hear--is generally studied in terms of the physical properties of sound stimuli and physiological properties of the auditory system. Based on recent work in vision, we here consider an alternative perspective that sensory percepts are based on past experience. In this framework, basic auditory qualities (e.g., loudness and pitch) are based on the frequency of occurrence...