Abstract
Active control over visual targets has been shown to influence spatial aspects of visual perception (eg, flash lag effect: Ichikawa & Masakura, 2006). We investigated whether or not observers' manual control over target motion affects the pattern of perceptual biases in audio/visual stream/bounce (Sekuler, Sekuler & Lau, 1997) displays. Participants completed four conditions: 1) zero control 2) full manual control over the targets via a concurrent left to right movement of a computer mouse 3) participants thought they were controlling the targets but were not 4) participants moved the mouse to accompany the target motion but were aware this motion was unrelated to the motion on the display. Participants responded “stream” or “bounce” at the end of each sequence when a sound was present or absent when the targets superimposed. Bouncing dominated when a sound was presented in the zero control condition replicated previous stream/bounce studies. The effect was reduced in the remaining conditions, though no sound trials elicited significantly fewer bounce reports than sound trials. These results support and extend our previous work (Grove & Sakurai, 2009) showing that the influence of a sound on the resolution of a motion sequence persists when proprioceptive information is consistent with streaming.