McGurk Effect

This film was made by Mark Mitton and Josh Aviner, with help from Susanna Mitton. The film demonstrates the McGurk Effect -- or how seeing influences hearing. Ventriloquists have played with many variations of this for a very long time, as has been noted in recent years by Alais D, Burr D., The ventriloquist effect results from near-optimal bimodal integration. Curr Biol. 2004 Mar 23;14(6):R236-8. Within the more formal study of perception, the effect was discovered by accident by Harry McGurk and his research assistant John McDonald while researching how infants perceive language. It was published in Nature in 1976. McGurk, H & MacDonald, J (1976); “Hearing lips and seeing voices,“ Nature, Vol 264(5588), pp. 746--748. More recently, Daniel Wright and Gary Wareham demonstrated how this effect could alter the perception of “ear witnesses of a crime scene“. Wright, Daniel and Wareham, Gary (2005); “Mixing sound and vision: The interaction of auditory and visual information for earwitnesses of a crime scene,“ Legal and Criminological Psychology, Vol 10(1), pp. 103--108. Also see Language Module as popularized by Steven Pinker. mark@