Sunday, October 28, 2007

The merging of Perceptions

An interesting new study -- researchers have found that the visual perception/interpretation of gender is affected by hearing. They played pure tones within the frequency range of male or female voices at the same time that subjects were looking at digitally morphed androgynous faces, and found that the faces were identified with as female when accompanied by the feminine frequency (160 to 300 Hz) and male when accompanies by the lower male frequency (100 to 150 Hz). However, the subjects were unable to determine whether the tones themselves were female or male when presented with paired tones; in that setting they simply chose based on the relative pitch of the two tones, regardless of actual range.

The study: "Auditory-Visual Cross-Modal Integration in Perception of Face Gender," published in a recent issue of Current Biology. The study's co-authors are investigators at Northwestern University's Visual Perception, Cognition and Neuroscience Laboratory: lead author Eric Smith, graduate student, Marcia Grabowecky, research assistant professor of psychology, and Satoru Suzuki, associate professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern.

Web link: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/86668.php

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