Perceptual learning of new multi-modal associations
Poster Presentation

Ipek Oruc
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia

Walter Bischof
Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta

Alan Kingstone
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia

     Abstract ID Number: 142
     Full text: Not available
     Last modified: March 21, 2005

Abstract
Many percepts are naturally a product of stimulation in multiple sensory modalities. Although the percept may be dominated by one modality, signals from other sensory modalities can be used to enhance, disambiguate or clarify the percept. Ecker and Heller (2005) investigated how auditory stimuli affected the interpretation of a moving ball’s trajectory and found that the sound of a ball rolling, or hitting the ground, when paired with the visual stimuli, influenced the appearance of the ball’s trajectory significantly. We investigated to what extent people can learn to associate two naturally unrelated events from two different modalities, so that the presence of one influences the perception of the other. We used an apparent motion display (Wohlschlager, 2000), where, 6 circularly placed dots appeared to rotate clockwise, counter-clockwise, or were bi-stable in both directions. We consistently paired each unambiguous rotation with a corresponding haptic stimulus, vibrotactile stimulation of different fingers, and we found that the perceived direction of the bi-stable display was indeed influenced by the haptic stimulation patterns.