Assessing the Contribution of Semantic Congruency to Multisensory Integration and Conflict Resolution
This work addresses multisensory integration for artificial agents and robots, but it is incremental as it extends prior research on audio-visual conflicts.
The study investigated how semantic congruency influences audio-visual conflict resolution in spatial localization tasks, finding that semantically related stimuli affect visual bias magnitude but humans primarily rely on environmental statistics.
The efficient integration of multisensory observations is a key property of the brain that yields the robust interaction with the environment. However, artificial multisensory perception remains an open issue especially in situations of sensory uncertainty and conflicts. In this work, we extend previous studies on audio-visual (AV) conflict resolution in complex environments. In particular, we focus on quantitatively assessing the contribution of semantic congruency during an AV spatial localization task. In addition to conflicts in the spatial domain (i.e. spatially misaligned stimuli), we consider gender-specific conflicts with male and female avatars. Our results suggest that while semantically related stimuli affect the magnitude of the visual bias (perceptually shifting the location of the sound towards a semantically congruent visual cue), humans still strongly rely on environmental statistics to solve AV conflicts. Together with previously reported results, this work contributes to a better understanding of how multisensory integration and conflict resolution can be modelled in artificial agents and robots operating in real-world environments.