In order to appreciate this, please proceed in the following order:
Soundcheck
(or hit key ‘s’). You should hear something of a ‘tchuck’; sound. If not, up your sound volume or go to another illusion :).1
(or hit key ‘1’). The balls should begin to move smoothly. At the very moment they meet, the ‘tchuck’; sound should occur. Use the long vertical slider on the right to adjust the timing, if the sound occurs too late (or too early).Compare the effects after pressing buttons 1
; or 2
; ad lib by determining the paths of the balls. Are they crossing like so ×
, or do they bounce off each other ><
?
Chances are: When there is no accompanying sound, the crossed path is seen, with the sound a bounce (><
) is more likely to be perceived.
This is a crossmodal illusion, where sound affects vision. It was long known from the Gestaltists that two identical visual targets moving across each other can be perceived either to bounce off or to stream through each other (Metzger 1934). In 1997 Sekuler et al. demonstrated that a brief sound at the moment the targets coincide, biases perception toward bouncing.
Metzger W (1934) Beobachtungen über phänomenale Identität. Psychologische Forschung 19:1–60
Sekuler R, Sekuler AB, R Lau (1997) Sound alters visual motion perception. Nature 385:308
Shimojo S, Shams L (2001) Sensory modalities are not separate modalities: plasticity and interactions. Curr Op Neurobiol 11:505–509
¹When I had implement this in Flash, there was no sound delay problem. By dropping Flash I ran into differences of sound implementations between browsers, so some individual calibration is necesssary.