Contributions of audition and vision to temporal rate perception

Abstract

Two experiments demonstrated that when both vision and audition are providing information about temporal rates in the range of 4 to 10 Hz, audition has a much stronger influence on the bimodal percept than does vision. This case of auditory "dominance" over vision was shown to be neither the result of a difference between the sensory modalities in perceived intensity nor all artifact of the magnitude estimation procedure used by the subject to indicate perceived rate. It was concluded that these results provide support for a "modality appropriateness" hypothesis of the relative contribution of various sensory modalities in multimodal perception. © 1986 Psychonomic Society, Inc.