Seconds of mismatched audiovisual context weaken the McGurk visual bias.

Evidence

To provide evidence for this “binding and fusion” AVSSA process, Nahorna et al. ( 2012 , 2015 ) showed that the McGurk effect can be significantly and strongly reduced by an audiovisual context made of a few seconds of incoherent material (sounds and images coming from different speech sources) presented before the McGurk target (audio “ba” plus video “ga”): the target, classically perceived as “da” in the McGurk effect, was more often perceived as “ba”, suggesting a decreased weight of the visual input in the fusion process. The interpretation was that the incoherent context resulted in an “unbinding” effect decreasing the visual weight and hence diminishing the McGurk effect. This modulation of the McGurk effect through incoherent contexts was further extended to speech in noise (Ganesh et al. 2013 ), and a possible neurophysiological correlate of the binding/unbinding process was provided in an EEG experiment (Ganesh et al. 2014 ). — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 5143

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s prior ‘One Square Inch of Silence’ and ‘Soundscape’ work on listening, and to cocktail-party/dual-stream perceptual binding generally.