alaisd

Username: alaisd

Participant details

	Network Member	David Alais
	Organisation/Institution	University of Sydney
	Department/Centre	School of Psychology
	Lab
	Website	http://
	Research area	Vision & Audition Audio-visual perceptual interactions
	Research keywords

Research Interests

My research involves psychophysical experiments addressing two areas: (1) perceptual interactions between audition and vision, and (2) auditory perception during rapid head movements. In my work on audio-visual perceptual interactions, a major focus has been on sensitivities to attributes (for example, spatial location) that are represented in two modalities, relative to a single modality. In particular, I have focused on the Maximum Likelihood Estimation model that states that multiple sensory estimates are combined as a weighted average, with the weights determined by the reliability of each modality's estimate. I have found this model works well in the spatial domain (accounting for ventriloquism, for example), and am now exploring it in the temporal domain and with spatiotemporal signals (eg, motion). Other work has looked at attentional resources for audition and vision, finding that both modalities have their own resources. That is, double-tasking is possible without any 'cost' provided those tasks are in separate modalities. Another focus has been on auditory perception during rapid head turns. Just as rapid eye movements (eg, saccades) produce compressions of visual space, we are finding significant spatial distortions (and even distortions of time) during rapid head turns as revealed by presenting brief target probes during the turn. Future work using the head-turn paradigm will explore absolute and discrimination thresholds and motion sensitivity to provide a sketch of auditory function during head turns. 1. D Alais, C Morrone, D Burr (2006) Separate attentional resources for vision and audition. Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series B (in press). 2. D Alais, D Burr (2004) The ventriloquist effect results from near-optimal cross-modal integration. Current Biology 14, 257-62.

Member for: 5 years 2 months 1 weeks 3 days