Chapter 13 provides insight into how vision and speech can work together in perception. An example of how the two senses are used together when perceiving what a person is saying is the McGurk experiment. In the video provided in the lecture slides, the McGurk experiment is described. The video shows how by looking atthe person while listening you hear the person saying "da da". Then by just listening and not looking you hear "ba ba". Finally, by just looking at the person and not hearing you see the person saying "ga ga". This experiment shows how the senses work together and were not developed independently of each other.
This is very interesting to me because I have noticed before that if I am having trouble seeing a person, it makes it more difficult to understand what they are saying. For example if I do not have my glasses on and I am talking to someone while looking at them, I find it hard to focus on what the person is saying. From that I would think that there is a link between hearing and seeing.
This post reminds me of how hard it must be to be deaf. Think about it... we take being able to hear as a simple task, however, for people who are deaf there other perception senses must be on high alert. When I was in grade school we had a deaf girl in our class. She was awesome at reading lips. She learned most days by just reading the teachers lips! It amazed me all of the time. I would find my self staring at her wondering how she did it and then be lost in the lesson because of my staring and lack of listening! Ultimately, I would be hearing the teacher but not looking at her, thus I did not even process what she was saying because I was interested in how this girl read her lips, or anyones lips for that matter! Pretty ironic now that I think about it...
ReplyDeleteGood analysis on this topic! I never realized the importance of combining the two senses together, but when I think about it it makes perfect sense. I agree with you, when someone is talking to me and I can't see them it is ultimately hard for me to understand them. I wear glasses to, so when I am not wearing them I sometimes find myself squinting my eyes to try to focus on an individual when I cannot hear them. So weird!
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