Effects of musical expertise on perceived audiovisual synchrony

Psychophysical and neurophysiological evidence suggests that professional music training influences audiovisual perception. However, Miner and Caudell (1998 Presence 7 396 - 409) point out how this hypothesis needs further investigation for the case of perceiving audiovisual synchrony. For this purpose, we investigated the effect of expertise on the audiovisual integration window by measuring the effects of changes in tempo and accent of a simple music pattern. Eighty-one point-light movies of a drummer performing swing groove on a drumhead (3 tempos × 3 accents × 9 audiovisual delays) were created. Four jazz-drummer experts and four novices were recruited for participating in the experiment. Twenty-one repetitions of each movie were presented in three separate sessions of 7 blocks, during which participants gave forced-choice judgments of audiovisual synchrony. Our results show a clear effect of expertise on perceived synchrony, as well as a negative correlation between tempo and the delay size which produced the best perceived synchrony (Arrighi et al, 2006 Journal of Vision 6 260 - 268), though this correlation varied with accent condition.