When you are looking for an object, does hearing its characteristic sound make you find it more quickly? Our recent results supported this possibility by demonstrating that when a cat target, for example, was presented among other objects, a simultaneously presented "meow" sound (containing no spatial information) reduced the manual response time for visual localization of the target. To extend...

When a moving object collides with an object at rest, people immediately perceive a causal event: i.e., the first object has launched the second object forwards. However, when the second object’s motion is delayed, or is accompanied by a collision sound, causal impressions attenuate and strengthen. Despite a rich literature on causal perception, researchers have exclusively utilized 2D visual d...

OF THESIS Objects can be identified from a number of perceptual attributes, including visual, auditory and tactile sensory input. The integration of these perceptual attributes constitutes our semantic knowledge of an object representation. This research uses functional neuroimaging to investigate the brain areas that integrate perceptual features into an object representation, and how these re...

Bilateral cochlear implant (BiCI) users have shown variability in interaural time difference (ITD) sensitivity at different places along the cochlea. This paper investigates perception of multi-electrode binaural stimulation to determine if auditory object formation (AOF) and lateralization are affected by variability in ITD sensitivity when a complex sound is encoded with multi-channel process...

An abrupt change in a visual attribute (size) of apparently moving visual stimuli extends the time the changed stimuli is visible even after its physical termination (visible persistence). In this study, we show that elongation of visible persistence is enhanced by an abrupt change in an attribute (frequency) of the sounds presented along with the size-changed apparently moving visual stimuli. ...

Natural environments typically contain multiple sound sources. The sounds from these sources frequently overlap in time and often mask each other. Masking could potentially distort the representation of a sound's spectrum, altering its timbre and impairing object recognition. Here, we report that the auditory system partially corrects for the effects of masking in such situations, by using the ...

An initial exploration of the relationship between harmonic timbre and visual form, the following study extends the work of Wolfgang Kohler’s 1929 study by using nonspeech sounds. Although previous studies have examined the relationship between language and shape, there has been little work investigating which properties of the acoustical signal contribute to the crossmodal linkage of auditory ...

Knowing the correct location of a specific object learned from a (topographic) map is fundamental for orientation and navigation tasks. Spatial reference systems, such as coordinates or cardinal directions, are helpful tools for any geometric localization of positions that aims to be as exact as possible. Considering modern visualization techniques of multimedia cartography, map elements transf...

In everyday acoustic scenes, figure-ground segregation typically requires one to group together sound elements over both time and frequency. Electroencephalogram was recorded while listeners detected repeating tonal complexes composed of a random set of pure tones within stimuli consisting of randomly varying tonal elements. The repeating pattern was perceived as a figure over the randomly chan...