In psychology, visual capture is the dominance of vision over other sense modalities in creating a percept.[1] In this process, the visual senses influence the other parts of the somatosensory system, to result in a perceived environment that is not congruent with the actual stimuli. Through this phenomenon, the visual system is able to disregard what other information a different sensory system is conveying, and provide a logical explanation for whatever output the environment provides. Visual capture allows one to interpret the location of sound as well as the sensation of touch without actually relying on those stimuli but rather creating an output that allows the individual to perceive a coherent environment.
One example of visual capture is known as the ventriloquism effect which refers to the perception of speech sounds as coming from a direction other than their true direction, due to the influence of visual stimuli from an apparent speaker.[2] Thus, when the ventriloquism illusion occurs, the speaker's voice is visually captured at the location of the dummy's moving mouth (rather than the speaker's carefully unmoving mouth).[3]
Another example of visual capture occurs when a sound that would normally be perceived as moving from left to right is heard while a person is viewing a visual stimulus that is moving from right to left; in this case, both sound and stimulus appear to be moving from right to left.[4]
- ^ Grünwald, Martin. Human haptic perception. Birkhauser, 2008. 657. Print.
- ^ "APA Dictionary of Psychology". dictionary.apa.org. Retrieved 16 January 2022.
- ^ Wright, Richard, and Lawrence Ward. Orienting of attention. Oxford University Press, USA, 2008. 215. Print. Retrieved Aug. 28, 2010, from [1].
- ^ Soto-Faraco et al. "When does visual perceptual grouping affect multisensory integration?." (2004): n. pag. Web. 28 Aug 2010. <http://cabn.psychonomic-journals.org/content/4/2/218.full.pdf>.