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Vision contingent auditory pitch aftereffects

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Abstract

Visual motion aftereffects can occur contingent on arbitrary sounds. Two circles, placed side by side, were alternately presented, and the onsets were accompanied by tone bursts of high and low frequencies, respectively. After a few minutes of exposure to the visual apparent motion with the tones, a circle blinking at a fixed location was perceived as a lateral motion in the same direction as the previously exposed apparent motion (Teramoto et al. in PLoS One 5:e12255, 2010). In the present study, we attempted to reverse this contingency (pitch aftereffects contingent on visual information). Results showed that after prolonged exposure to the audio-visual stimuli, the apparent visual motion systematically affected the perceived pitch of the auditory stimuli. When the leftward apparent visual motion was paired with the high–low-frequency sequence during the adaptation phase, a test tone sequence was more frequently perceived as a high–low-pitch sequence when the leftward apparent visual motion was presented and vice versa. Furthermore, the effect was specific for the exposed visual field and did not transfer to the other side, thus ruling out an explanation in terms of simple response bias. These results suggest that new audiovisual associations can be established within a short time, and visual information processing and auditory processing can mutually influence each other.

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Notes

  1. High/low labeling of sound pitch in the present study is defined by overtone spectrum. The more higher-order overtone is contained in a tone burst, the higher its perceived pitch would be. Conversely, the more lower-order overtone is contained in a tone burst, the lower its perceived pitch would be.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology, Grant-in-Aid for Specially Promoted Research (No. 19001004).

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Correspondence to Wataru Teramoto or Yoichi Sugita.

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Teramoto, W., Kobayashi, M., Hidaka, S. et al. Vision contingent auditory pitch aftereffects. Exp Brain Res 229, 97–102 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-013-3596-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-013-3596-z

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