St. Thomas University psychology professor Doris Chow revealed her research on how sound influences visual stability and multisensory perception in a public lecture on March 17.
Chow had the opportunity to speak about her ongoing research in a lecture titled “The Effect of Sound on Visual Stability Perception,” as part of the Dialogos Faculty Seminar Series.
The question her research looks to answer is whether sound can affect visual stability, the brain’s ability to perceive a stable and continuous world despite the constant movement of the eyes and head during eye movements.
“We use a combination of these saccades and smooth pursuit eye movement in order to experience the world,” she said. “So you can imagine a lot of brain areas are dedicated to processing and controlling these eye movements in order to be precise.”
A saccade is a rapid, jerky movement of the eyes that shifts the gaze from one point to another, enabling people to quickly scan and focus on different areas of interest.
For the research, Chow and her team use eye trackers to get the digitized position of the eye and detect the several small changes that happen in a second.
The research looks into how auditory and visual events influence multisensory processing, which is the way the brain combines information from different sensory modalities such as vision, hearing and touch to create a coherent perception of the world.
It also explores whether sound changes challenge the assumption of the stable world and thus improves the ability to see these visual changes during saccades.
Chow has found that people are better at detecting visual changes during eye movements when a sound with a brief gap happens at the same time as the visual change.
One challenge she found while working on her research at STU was the small student body that sometimes makes it difficult to recruit participants for the study.
Gavin Woodward is a fourth-year psychology student whose thesis also delves into visual perception. He said there is a challenge of detecting eye movements in real time.
“Technologically, these are very complex experiments that take a lot of thoughts and a lot of optimization to make them work really well,” he said.
Woodward said these kinds of studies are great to “blend in behavioural and neurocognitive research.”
“By collecting stuff like eye movement data, we can get a really good sense of what’s going on in the brain in ways that we wouldn’t be able to with other psychological research methods,” he said.
“Students are not very used to these studies,” said Chow. “They haven’t necessarily been trained in this experiment and can give us clear data because they haven’t experienced this before.”
Since STU is a liberal arts university, the humanities and social sciences perspectives provide scientific based hypotheses with a different approach.
“There really is some strong science being done at Dr. Chow’s lab,” said Woodward. “It’s opened up so many doors to work in the vision sciences, even though you might not traditionally think of there being much scientific work going on at STU.”
