Induced effects on body sway by the synchronous presentation of a visual wide‐field stimulus with an auditory stimulus

Abstract This paper discusses the induced effect on the body sway when an iteratively rotating visual wide‐field stimulus and an auditory stimulus with a moving sound image are presented simultaneously with synchronization. When the sound image is iteratively rotated in phase relative to the iteratively rotating visual stimulus, the induced effect on the body sway increases when the visual angle of the visual stimulus is increased, compared to the case in which the auditory stimulus is presented in the opposite phase. When the visual angle of the visual stimulus is reduced, on the other hand, there is no difference in the induced effects between the in‐phase and opposite‐phase conditions. These results suggest that when the visual and auditory stimuli are simultaneously presented, the induced effects of the visual and auditory stimuli on body sway are not simply added, but that there is an interaction between the two effects. It is suggested that the induced effect due to the interaction between the visual and auditory stimuli depends on the visual angle of the visual stimulus, and is enhanced by the wider field visual stimulus. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 3, 85(10): 31–39, 2002; Published online in Wiley InterScience ( www.interscience.wiley.com ). DOI 10.1002/ecjc.1123