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Does an auditory perceptual illusion affect on-line auditory action control? The case of (de)accentuation and synchronization

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Abstract

Many recent studies have investigated whether visual (spatial) illusions affect visual (spatio-temporal) action control, with results that are far from simple. The present study asks the analogous question with regard to auditory temporal perception and action timing. The auditory illusion chosen for this particular study is the effect of increasing or decreasing the intensity of a tone in a sequence (i.e., accentuation or deaccentuation) on its perceived relative time of occurrence. The motor task is sensorimotor synchronization (finger tapping), specifically the automatic phase correction response to an advanced or delayed tone in a sequence. The strong hypothesis was that (de)accentuation would affect perceptual judgments of the tone’s relative time of occurrence, but would have no effect at all on the phase correction response. The results of two experiments, if averaged across participants, confirm these predictions and furthermore suggest that individual perceptual and sensorimotor effects of (de)accentuation are uncorrelated. It is argued that perception and motor control in this case probably rely on different kinds of temporal information: relative versus absolute time of occurrence. Two unexpected findings complicate the results, however: the perceptual illusion was asymmetric, occurring only for delayed tones; and many individual participants did show significant differences in their phase correction response to accented and deaccented tones, although the direction of that difference varied.

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Notes

  1. The automatic PCR is typically smaller than the “ordinary” PCR obtained when participants are merely instructed to stay in synchrony, particularly when the EOS is large enough to be detected (Repp 2002a, c). The purpose of the instructions given here (i.e., not to react to an EOS) was to elicit the purely automatic component of the PCR, which is assumed to reflect phase correction only and is hypothesized to be independent of conscious perception. The ordinary PCR includes a consciously controlled component of phase correction or perhaps even a contribution of period correction, which depends on conscious perception (Repp 2002b; Repp and Keller 2004).

  2. Due to a peculiarity of this setup, the tempo of the output was about 2.4% faster than specified in the MIDI instructions, as determined in earlier acoustic waveform measurements. The participants’ key presses were registered at a correspondingly slower rate. All millisecond values are reported as they appeared in the MAX environment.

  3. All slopes were a good deal steeper than expected: The average slope for the same Δt values—although embedded in a context of larger Δt values—in a previous experiment (Repp 2002c) had been .41. In other words, participants responded quite vigorously to the EOSs, even though they had been instructed to ignore them.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by NIH grant MH-51230. Support from NIH grants HD-01994 (Carol Fowler, P.I.) and DC-03663 (Elliot Saltzman, P.I.) during preparation of the manuscript is gratefully acknowledged. Helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript were received from Peter Keller, Günther Knoblich, and two anonymous reviewers.

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    Bruno H. Repp

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Repp, B.H. Does an auditory perceptual illusion affect on-line auditory action control? The case of (de)accentuation and synchronization. Exp Brain Res 168, 493–504 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-005-0108-9

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