The perception of cross-modal simultaneity (Or 'The Greenwich Observatory Problem 'Revisited)

摘要

One of the oldest questions in experimental psychology concerns the perception of simultaneous events, particularly when input arrives through two different sensory channels (such as sight and sound or touch and sound). How far apart in time do two events have to be before they are perceived as sequential? It was this problem in the Greenwich Observatory in 1795 that led to the first experiments in perceptual thresholds in the 1830s, and the development of psychophyics. Laboraotry experiments in this century have yielded contradictory results about the magnitude of temporal offset (or asynchrony) that gives rise to the perception of successiveness, perhaps (we argue) because of the artificial nature of the tasks involved.