Low-level audiovisual synchrony: Experiments and model

We have carried out experiments to explore the effect of prior knowledge and expectation on the detection of audiovisual synchrony. By expanding on earlier methodologies, we have shown that the perception of synchrony is not affected by prior knowledge of lag type (i.e., visual signal precedes audio signal or vice versa). This result suggests that higher-level cognitive processes like expectation do not play a significant role in synchrony perception. We also introduce here a systems-level model based on cross-correlation that is compatible with both the observations of our experiments and with the observations of other studies.