The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.įunding: This work has been realized thanks to the support from the Provincia Autonoma di Trento and the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Trento e Rovereto. Received: AugAccepted: MaPublished: April 26, 2013Ĭopyright: © 2013 Fracasso et al. PLoS ONE 8(4):Įditor: Joel Snyder, University of Nevada Las Vegas, United States of America Our findings are consistent with arguments for a tight link between perception and action in localization tasks.Ĭitation: Fracasso A, Targher S, Zampini M, Melcher D (2013) Fooling the Eyes: The Influence of a Sound-Induced Visual Motion Illusion on Eye Movements.

These results show that both an audio-visual and a purely visual illusion can significantly affect visuo-motor behavior. Moreover, the magnitude of this bias was strongly correlated with the effect size of the perceptual illusion. Specifically, the landing positions of saccades performed towards flickering static bars in the periphery were biased in the direction of illusory motion. We found that illusory motion perception modulated by an auditory context consistently affected saccadic eye movements. To test the role of auditory context on a visual illusion and on eye movements, we took advantage of the fact that the presence of an auditory cue can successfully modulate illusory motion perception of an otherwise static flickering object (sound-induced visual motion effect). The question of whether perceptual illusions influence eye movements is critical for the long-standing debate regarding the separation between action and perception.

Auditory illusion