In Figure 5a the shift in measured and predicted PSEs relative to the 0 conflict condition is plotted against the three levels of haptic-auditory conflict.
A well-known phenomenon occurs in case of visual-auditory spatial conflict: when a visual stimulus and an auditory stimulus are presented simultaneously but in disparate spatial positions, the perceived location of the sound is shifted towards the visual stimulus (i.e., visual bias of sound localization) [ 4– 6].
With respect to the controls, patients were not impaired in the CATS tasks involving discrimination of nonemotional prosody, naming of emotional stimuli expressed by voice and judging the emotional content of a sentence, whereas they showed a specific impairment in decoding emotion in a conflicting auditory condition and in the multichannel modality.
Here we investigate the role of synesthetic correspondences on the integration of pairs of temporally (Experiment 1 and 2) or spatially (Experiment 3) conflicting auditory and visual stimuli.
Even though echolocation presumably presented windows as hard surfaces, non-blindfolded individuals repeatedly collided with the glass within one trial, suggesting they had not seen the windows and were using visual cues over conflicting auditory ones, or that the smooth glass surfaces were vertical echoacoustic mirrors and perceived as open flyways ([18], B.M. Siemers personal communication).
Extensive literature exists on human behavior in the presence of an incongruence, or cue conflict, between auditory and visual speech.
Next, we examine the intersensory conditions, in which auditory and visual signals convey conflicting temporal and/or feature information.
This conclusion is further supported by the findings of Experiment 2 in which even adults were not completely able to solve sensory conflict through haptic-auditory integration.
In particular, estimates requiring access to temporal (Experiments 1 & 2) and spatial (Experiment 3) conflicts between synesthetically congruent auditory and visual stimuli were found to be less reliable (i.e., higher discrimination thresholds) than those requiring access to conflicts between synesthetically incongruent stimuli.
In Experiment 2 we further examined the development of haptic-auditory integration by examining size discrimination in haptic-auditory conditions with three different levels of cue conflict in a second group of 5 6-, 7 8-, 10 11-year-old 10 11-year-old 10 11-year-old
