A Study About Confounding Causation in Audio-Visual Mapping

Adriana Sá, Baptiste Caramieux, Atau Tanaka (2014) A Study About Confounding Causation in Audio-Visual Mapping. In xCoAx 2014 Proceedings , pp. 274-288

The text reports a study, which draws upon methods from experimental psychology to inform audio-visual instrument design. The study aims at gleaning how an audio-visual mapping can produce a sense of causation, and simultaneously confound the actual cause and effect relationships. We call this a fungible audio-visual mapping. The participants in this study are shown a few audio-visual mapping prototypes. We collect quantitative and qualitative data on their sense of causation and their sense of understanding the cause-effect relationships. The study shows that a fungible mapping requires both synchronized and seemingly non-related components - sufficient complexity to be confusing. The sense of causation embraces the whole when the specific cause-effect concepts are inconclusive.