audio-visual integration

A term used in AUDITORY PHONETICS, referring to the way in which a percept may result from a combination of auditory and visual inputs. The phenomenon was reported by British psychologists HARRY MCGURK and John MacDonald in 1976, who noted that when hearing [ba] and simultaneously seeing a video of a face saying [ga], the percept was in the ‘middle’, [da]. It has since come to be called the McGurk effect or illusion.