I have no reason to post this other than I sometimes find the limits of our perception to be fascinating:
For some I get the sense that the takeaway from this is that we shouldn’t rely so much on our senses. For me I can’t help but thinking if we scramble such basic info we had better have a general stance of epistemic humility wherein we are cautious about any and all knowledge that we acquire.
I had to go look up what the McGurck effect is and didn’t understand what the significance was of showing different lip movements for the same sound. I noticed the sound never changed despite the lip movement changing but wasn’t sure why it was supposed to be significant.
Does this perceptual illusion depend on fully synchronized binocular vision to work?
Hmm, it may. I also find there’s a lot of things that are supposed to be audibly imperceptible that musicians key into because they spend that much more time listening carefully to music – so you have that too. There’s a similar trick that was done by a group that researched wine experts and found that if they made reds look white and vice versa, the oenophiles were fooled.
It may be a double whammy for me not getting the effect because I’m a musician who does not have fully binocular vision. There may be other situations in which the cognitive illusion can take place if the basic premise holds, right?