Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The McGurk effect is a multisensory phenomenon, an audiovisual illusion that shows how speech sounds may interfere with the visual sense. In case of an incongruency between a speech sound and a human face articulating the speech sound, human interlocutors tend to perceive an audiovisual percept different from the sound percept and the visual percept. For example, if the speech sound is ba and the visual presentation of the articulation is fa, human interlocutors usually perceive a third sound, va. What can we learn about audiovisual integration using an avatar face? To what extent do we observe the McGurk effect? The present study reports an empirical investigation that tested the extent of the effect in an avatar face designed for the purpose of the study. Our findings suggest that systematic patterns may obtained from the analysis of a specific avatar face, designed for the purpose of the study. The results also reveal the potential use of avatar designs for evaluating the impact of avatar designs on human multisensory integration by employing human responses to audiovisual illusions on avatar faces.