Seeing Is Believing, 2 of 5

Have you experienced the McGurk effect? This effect may be experienced when a video of one sound production is dubbed with a sound-recording of a different sound being spoken. Often, the perceived sound is a third, intermediate sound. For example, the syllable “ba-ba” is spoken over the lip movements of “ga-ga”, and the perception is of “da-da”. Reserachers McGurk and MacDonald believed that this resulted from the common sound and visual properties of “b” and “g” and involved the brain's effort to provide the consciousness with its best guess about the incoming information. The information coming from the eyes and ears is contradictory, and in this instance, the eyes (visual information) had a greater effect on the brain and thus the fusion and combination responses have been created. Vision is a primary sense for humans while speech perception is multimodal, meaning it involves information from more than one sensory modality, in particular, auditory and visual.