auditory-visual object recognition time suggests specific processing for animal soundsauditory-visual对象识别时间显示特定处理动物的声音.pdf

Auditory-Visual Object Recognition Time Suggests Specific Processing for Animal Sounds Clara Suied*, Isabelle Viaud-Delmon Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique / Musique (IRCAM) - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), UMR 9912, Paris, France Abstract Background: Recognizing an object requires binding together several cues, which may be distributed across different sensory modalities, and ignoring competing information originating from other objects. In addition, knowledge of the semantic category of an object is fundamental to determine how we should react to it. Here we investigate the role of semantic categories in the processing of auditory-visual objects. Methodology/Findings: We used an auditory-visual object-recognition task (go/no-go paradigm). We compared recognition times for two categories: a biologically relevant one (animals) and a non-biologically relevant one (means of transport). Participants were asked to react as fast as possible to target objects, presented in the visual and/or the auditory modality, and to withhold their response for distractor objects. A first main finding was that, when participants were presented with unimodal or bimodal congruent stimuli (an image and a sound from the same object), similar reaction times were observed for all object categories. Thus, there was no advantage in the speed of recognition for biologically relevant compared to non-biologically relevant objects. A second finding was that, in the presence of a biologically relevant auditory distractor, the processing of a target object was slowed down, whether or not it was itself biologically relevant. It seems impossible to effectively ignore an animal sound, even when it is irrelevant to the task. Conclusions/Significance: These results suggest a s