Directing spatial attention towards the illusory location of a ventriloquized sound
Section snippets
Subjects
Nineteen subjects were recruited by advertisement to take part in this experiment. All were first year students from Tilburg University and they received course credits for their participation. Data of three subjects were discarded from the analysis because their performance in auditory elevation discrimination was below 80% correct. The remaining subjects, 13 females and 3 males, all had normal hearing and vision.
Apparatus and materials
All experiments were conducted in a dimly lit soundproof booth. Subjects were
Method
Nineteen new subjects took part in this experiment. One subject was unable to make the auditory up–down discrimination above 80% and his data were therefore removed from the analysis. Of the remaining subjects nine were females and nine males.
The apparatus, materials, and design were exactly the same as in Experiment 1, except that cues from the auditory condition were replaced by ventriloquist cues. A ventriloquist cue consisted of a lateral visual cue synchronized with a cue tone emitted from
Method
Twenty-six new subjects took part in this experiment. The apparatus, materials, and design were all as in Experiment 2. The same number of trials were run, but now evenly distributed across six SOAs (100, 200, 300, 400, 500, and 600 ms).
Results and discussion
The intersubject means of median RTs are shown in Table 3, separately for each modality of the cue and each SOA. In the overall ANOVA on the median RTs, there was a significant effect of SOA, because responses were again slower at the
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Ministry of Scientific Research of the Belgian French-speaking Community (Concerted Research Action 96/01-2037) and by the Belgian National Fund for Collective Fundamental Research (Contract 2.45.39.95). We like to thank Esther IJpelaar for help in testing subjects.
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