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Sensory Interaction

How

does
does

1.6-16
1.6-16 How does sensory interaction influence our perceptions, and what is

How
How
does

y interaction
ceptions, and what is
influence our per

sensor

y interaction

sensor
embodied cognition?
embodied cognition?
We have seen that vision and kinesthesis interact. Actually, none of our senses acts alone.
All of them — seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching — eavesdrop on one another, and
our brain blends their inputs to interpret the world ( Rosenblum, 2013 ). This is sensory
interaction at work. One sense can influence another.
Consider how smell sticks its nose into the business of taste. Hold your nose, close your
eyes, and have someone feed you various foods. A slice of apple may be indistinguishable
Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Not for redistribution.
from a chunk of raw potato. A cracker may taste like cardboard. Without their smells, a cup
of cold coffee may be hard to distinguish from a glass of Gatorade. A big part of taste is right
under your nose.
Copyright © Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
Contrary to Aristotle’s presumption that taste sensors were found only on the tongue,
you also inhale the aroma through your nose — a scientific fact not understood until 1812
( Bartoshuk et al., 2019 ). Like smoke rising in a chimney, food molecules released by chewing
rise into your nasal cavity. This is why food tastes bland when you have a bad cold. Smell
can also change our perception of taste: A drink’s strawberry odor enhances our perception
of its sweetness. Even touch can influence taste. Depending on its texture, a potato chip
“tastes” fresh or stale ( Smith, 2011 ). Smell + texture + taste = flavor. Yet perhaps you have
noticed: Flavor feels located in the mouth ( Stevenson, 2014 ).
Vision and hearing may similarly interact. Baseball umpires’ vision informs their hear-
ing of when the ball hits a player’s glove, influencing their judgments of whether baserun-
ners are safe or out ( Krynen & McBeath, 2019 ). Likewise, a weak flicker of light becomes
more visible when accompanied by a short burst of sound ( Kayser, 2007 ). The reverse is also
true: Soft sounds are more easily heard when paired with a visual cue. If I [DM], as a person
with hearing loss, watch a video with on-screen captions, I have no trouble hearing the
words I am seeing. But if I then decide I don’t need the captions and turn them off, I quickly
sensory interaction the realize I do need them. The eyes guide the ears ( Figure 1.6-26 ).

principle that one sense can So, our senses interact. But what happens if they disagree? What if our eyes see a speaker
influence another, as when the form one sound but our ears hear another sound? Surprise: Our brain may perceive a third
smell of food influences its taste.
sound that blends both inputs. Seeing mouth movements for ga while hearing ba, we may
perceive da. This phenomenon is known as the McGurk effect, after Scottish psychologist

Harry McGurk, who, with his assistant John MacDonald, discovered the effect ( McGurk
& MacDonald, 1976 ).
For most of us, lip
Figure 1.6-26 reading is part of hear-
Sensory interaction ing, which is why mask
Seeing the speaker forming the wearing during the
words in video chats makes those Covid pandemic has
words easier to understand for
hard-of-hearing people ( Knight, made communication
2004 ). more challenging.
We have seen that
our perceptions have
two main ingredients:
© Albrecht Weisser/Westend61/Corbis tions and our top-
our bottom-up sensa-
down cognitions (such
as expectations, atti-
tudes, thoughts, and

154 Unit 1 Biological Bases of Behavior memories). In everyday

03_myersAPpsychology4e_28116_ch01_002_163.indd 154 15/12/23 9:27 AM