Perception of scenes in different sensory modalities: A result of modal completion

Abstract

Dynamic perception includes amodal and modal completion, along with apparent movement. It fills temporal gaps for single objects. In 2 experiments, using 6 stimulus presentation conditions involving 3 sensory modalities, participants experienced 8–10 sequential stimuli (200 ms each) with interstimulus intervals (ISIs) of 0.25–7.0 s. Experiments focused on spatiotemporal completion (walking), featural completion (object changing), auditory completion (falling bomb), and haptic changes (insect crawling). After each trial, participants judged whether they experienced the process of “happening†or whether they simply knew that the process must have occurred. The phenomenon was frequency independent, being reported at short ISIs but not at long ISIs. The phenomenon involves dynamic modal completion and possibly also conceptual processes.