Assessing the effect of visual and tactile distractors on the perception of auditory apparent motion

In this study we investigated the effect of the directional congruency of tactile, visual, or bimodal visuotactile apparent motion distractors on the perception of auditory apparent motion. Participants had to judge the direction in which an auditory apparent motion stream moved (left-to-right or right-to-left) while trying to ignore one of a range of distractor stimuli, including unimodal tactile or visual, bimodal visuotactile, and crossmodal (i.e., composed of one visual and one tactile stimulus) distractors. Significant crossmodal dynamic capture effects (i.e., better performance when the target and distractor stimuli moved in the same direction rather than in opposite directions) were demonstrated in all conditions. Bimodal distractors elicited more crossmodal dynamic capture than unimodal distractors, thus providing the first empirical demonstration of the effect of information presented simultaneously in two irrelevant sensory modalities on the perception of motion in a third (target) sensory modality. The results of a second experiment demonstrated that the capture effect reported in the crossmodal distractor condition was most probably attributable to the combined effect of the individual static distractors (i.e., to ventriloquism) rather than to any emergent property of crossmodal apparent motion.