Audiovisual plasticity following early abnormal visual experience: Reduced McGurk effect in people with one eye.
Previously, we have shown that people who have had one eye surgically removed early in life during visual development have enhanced sound localization [1] and lack visual dominance, commonly observed in binocular and monocular (eye-patched) viewing controls [2]. Despite these changes, people with one eye integrate auditory and visual components of multisensory events optimally [3]. The current study investigates how people with one eye perceive the McGurk effect, an audiovisual illusion where a new syllable is perceived when visual lip movements do not match the corresponding sound [4]. We compared individuals with one eye to binocular and monocular viewing controls and found that they have a significantly smaller McGurk effect compared to binocular controls. Additionally, monocular controls tended to perceive the McGurk effect less often than binocular controls suggesting a small transient modulation of the McGurk effect. These results suggest altered weighting of the auditory and visual modalities with both short and long-term monocular viewing. These results indicate the presence of permanent adaptive perceptual accommodations in people who have lost one eye early in life that may serve to mitigate the loss of binocularity during early brain development.
['Moro|Stefania S|SS|', 'Steeves|Jennifer K E|JKE|']
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation D000328:Adult D001307:Auditory Perception D005260:Female D006801:Humans D007088:Illusions D008297:Male D008875:Middle Aged D010775:Photic Stimulation D011930:Reaction Time D013017:Sound Localization D015349:Vision, Monocular D014796:Visual Perception D055815:Young Adult
McGurk effect Multisensory Audiovisual processing Face processing Monocular enucleation Voice processing