The short version
- In a Queensland University of Technology experiment, musicians’ judgments of where a sound came from were pulled 1.6 degrees less toward a nearby flash than nonmusicians’.
- Modeling suggested musicians simply expect less that a sight and a sound share a source, not that they hear location more sharply.
- The difference was small, significant in only one of two analyses, and the design cannot show that training causes it.
The ventriloquism illusion is the reason a voice seems to come from a puppet’s mouth: when a sound and a flash happen together, the brain tends to place the sound where the flash is. A team led by Matthew O’Donohue at Queensland University of Technology tested whether musical training weakens that pull, in a study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance reported by PsyPost on October 12.
Thirty-five musicians, with an average of 12 years on an instrument, and 35 nonmusicians, mostly first-year psychology students, sat in a dark room and located flashes, sounds or both from five speaker positions over 420 trials. The flash and sound came from the same place only 20% of the time. In a second run the participants were told that. Musicians’ sound judgments were pulled 1.6 degrees less toward the flash. Telling everyone the odds reduced the illusion for both groups, and the musicians kept their edge.
The authors’ model puts the difference down to musicians expecting less that a sight and a sound belong together, not to sharper hearing. The effect was significant in one of the two analyses, and the study compares groups rather than training anyone, so it cannot say lessons cause it.
