Starting in the evening with an in-depth orientation on the play that will be seen that evening, we then offer a free half hour of entertainment designed to put the play-goer in a complimentary mood for the play they are about to enjoy; this is followed the next morning by a compelling talk-back (seminar) on what the patron saw and experienced the night before.
In Experiment 1, only orthographically projected plws were presented and subjective responses on the perceived in-depth orientation were recorded.
Observers were explicitly instructed to ignore the sound and to only report the visually perceived in-depth orientation.
The present results suggest that looming and receding sounds alter the judgements of the in-depth orientation of depth-ambiguous point-light walkers.
Schouten and Verfaillie [34] recently developed a technique to gradually manipulate the perceived in-depth orientation of plws with perspective cues.
The goal of the present study was to test whether looming and receding sounds affect the perceived in-depth orientation of depth-ambiguous plws.
The size of the effect of looming sound on the perceived in-depth orientation found in Experiment 1 may thus be an underestimation.
As orthographic plws contain no objective cues as to their in-depth orientation there was, in fact, no right or wrong response.
Despite the instruction to ignore the sound and to only report the visually perceived in-depth orientation, observers' judgements were affected by looming and receding sounds.
However, pilot experiments in our lab show that observers perform near chance-level when having to indicate the in-depth orientation of an inverted plw that is disambiguated with perspective cues.
The changes in task performance that are observed are exactly the changes that would be expected if looming sounds have a perceptual effect on the visually perceived in-depth orientation.
