Enhanced audiovisual temporal sensitivity when viewing videos that appropriately depict the effect of gravity on object movement

We report a study designed to examine how knowledge of the effects of gravity may change the temporal processing of audiovisual events. Specifically, normally-oriented and inverted audiovisual video-clips of different objects being dropped were presented at a range of different stimulus onset asynchronies. Participants made temporal order judgments regarding whether the auditory/visual stream appeared to have been presented first. The results revealed that inverting the visual-display of the falling object led to a significant difference in participant's ability to judge the temporal order of the auditory/ visual components of the desynchronized video-clips. That is, participants were more sensitive to audiovisual asynchrony when viewing normally-oriented video-clips of the falling object as compared to viewing the same clips inverted. These results demonstrate that people's understanding of the effects of gravity on object movement can affect their temporal sensitivity when violations of the fundamental physical parameters determining the movement of real objects are introduced. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.