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Concept
Visual capture
Summary
In psychology, visual capture is the dominance of vision over other sense modalities in creating a percept. 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. 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).
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.
When two sensory stimuli are presented simultaneously, vision is capable of dominating and capturing the other. This occurs as visual cues can distract from other sensations, causing the origin of the stimulus to appear as if it is being produced by the visual cue. Therefore, when an individual is in an environment, and multiple stimuli reach the brain at once, there is a hierarchy that vision will guide the rest of the somatosensory cues to be perceived as though they align with the visual experience, despite where their original source may be. Research has found that the visual and auditory reflexive spatial orienting are controlled through a common underlying neural substrate.
Official source
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