Published on: Monday, February 24, 2014

Suggestion overrides the McGurk illusion

Another fascinating study from Amir Raz's lab. They have previously demonstrated the ability for suggestion in high hypnotisables to reduce the magnitude of the Stroop effect. In this study they used suggestion to reduce the magnitude of the McGurk illusion - an effect thought to be automatic and beyond voluntary control. For a demonstration of the McGurk illusion watch the BBC Horizon video below:

Déry, C., Campbell, N. K. J., Lifshitz, M., Raz, A. (2014). Suggestion overrides automatic audiovisual integration. Consciousness and Cognition, 24, 33-37.

Abstract

Cognitive scientists routinely distinguish between controlled and automatic mental processes. Through learning, practice, and exposure, controlled processes can become automatic; however, whether automatic processes can become deautomatized – recuperated under the purview of control – remains unclear. Here we show that a suggestion derails a deeply ingrained process involving involuntary audiovisual integration. We compared the performance of highly versus less hypnotically suggestible individuals (HSIs versus LSIs) in a classic McGurk paradigm – a perceptual illusion task demonstrating the influence of visual facial movements on auditory speech percepts. Following a posthypnotic suggestion to prioritize auditory input, HSIs but not LSIs manifested fewer illusory auditory perceptions and correctly identified more auditory percepts. Our findings demonstrate that a suggestion deautomatized a ballistic audiovisual process in HSIs. In addition to guiding our knowledge regarding theories and mechanisms of automaticity, the present findings pave the road to a more scientific understanding of top-down effects and multisensory integration.

View paper at ScienceDirect