Eye-gaze and arrow cues influence elementary sound perception

Abstract

We report a novel effect in which the visual perception of eye-gaze and arrow cues change the way we perceive sound. In our experiments, subjects first saw an arrow or gazing face, and then heard a brief sound originating from one of six locations. Perceived sound origins were shifted in the direction indicated by the arrows or eye-gaze. This perceptual shift was equivalent for both arrows and gazing faces and was unaffected by facial expression, consistent with a generic, supramodal attentional influence by exogenous cues. © 2010 The Royal Society.