McGurk stimuli for the investigation of multisensory integration in cochlear implant users: The Oldenburg Audio Visual Speech Stimuli (OLAVS)

• Published in: Psychonomic bulletin & review Vol. 24; no. 3; pp. 863 - 872
• Main Authors: Stropahl, Maren, Schellhardt, Sebastian, Debener, Stefan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.06.2017; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Adult; Aged; Behavioral Science and Psychology; Brain research; Brief Report; Cochlear Implants; Cognitive Psychology; Deafness; Female; Females; Hearing Loss - physiopathology; Humans; Male; Middle Aged; Neurosciences; Psychology; Quality; Speech; Speech Perception - physiology; Studies; Transplants & implants; Visual Perception - physiology; Young Adult; Cochlear implants; McGurk illusion; Audio-visual integration
• ISSN: 1069-9384; 1531-5320; 1531-5320
• DOI: 10.3758/s13423-016-1148-9

The concurrent presentation of different auditory and visual syllables may result in the perception of a third syllable, reflecting an illusory fusion of visual and auditory information. This well-known McGurk effect is frequently used for the study of audio-visual integration. Recently, it was shown that the McGurk effect is strongly stimulus-dependent, which complicates comparisons across perceivers and inferences across studies. To overcome this limitation, we developed the freely available Oldenburg audio-visual speech stimuli (OLAVS), consisting of 8 different talkers and 12 different syllable combinations. The quality of the OLAVS set was evaluated with 24 normal-hearing subjects. All 96 stimuli were characterized based on their stimulus disparity, which was obtained from a probabilistic model (cf. Magnotti & Beauchamp, 2015 ). Moreover, the McGurk effect was studied in eight adult cochlear implant (CI) users. By applying the individual, stimulus-independent parameters of the probabilistic model, the predicted effect of stronger audio-visual integration in CI users could be confirmed, demonstrating the validity of the new stimulus material.