ABSTRACT
This chapter explores visual illusion from the perspective of cognitive neuroscience, looking specifically at how sound changes our perception of action in film. There are many layers of cognitive processing that influence the way we perceive visual elements and ascribe meaning to them in the context of a film, and a number of analytical models that are proposed to explore that process. Multisensory neurons respond differently when they encounter congruent audio and visual stimuli occurring simultaneously than when they encounter the same stimuli separately or when the grouping cues are weak. In summary, there are three important components of sound-induced visual illusion: strong audiovisual synchrony, crossmodal congruency, and visual ambiguity. Ambiguity plays an important role, because when visual information is unclear, missing, or incoherent it forces the brain to rely on other information to fill in the gaps and create coherence.
