Duration judgments with conflicting audiovisual cues

Abstract

Previous work showed that observers integrate audiovisual duration cues optimally when cue-conflict is small. Does causal inference lead to a breakdown of audiovisual integration when duration conflicts are large? We addressed this by testing a wide range of duration cue-conflicts. Participants compared the auditory durations of a test and a standard stimulus. Audiovisual durations were consistent in the test stimulus, but differed by seven conflict durations (up to 250 ms) in the standard. Two levels of auditory noise were tested. Auditory duration percepts shifted systematically toward the visual duration, especially with high auditory noise. The shift was proportional to cue-conflict magnitude, inconsistent with causal inference. We compared several models. A heuristic model in which the observer probabilistically switches between the visual and auditory cues was preferred for most participants, although performance differences across models were small. Within the tested conflict range, the forced fusion, causal inference, and probabilistic cue switching models produced overlapping, near-linear shifts as a function of cue-conflict. Model simulations further revealed that given the measured sensory noise, forced fusion and causal inference can be discriminated only with unreasonably large conflicts. Together, while our results suggest that observers do not rely on causal inference when judging auditory durations under our conditions, high sensory encoding noise in auditory duration limits the discriminability of competing computational models.