Fuzzy logical model of bimodal emotion perception: Comment on “The perception of emotions by ear and by eye” by de Gelder and Vroomen

Abstract

De Gelder and Vroomen (this issue) studied how emotions are perceived from information given by the face and the voice. Emotions in the face and the voice were presented under both unimodal and bimodal conditions. When participants identified the affect, they were influenced by information from both modalities. This result occurred even when they were instructed to base their judgement on just one of the modalities. These experiments and results provide an independent replication of similar studies published in Massaro (1998). Given this opportunity for a new set of tests, the fuzzy logical model of perception (FLMP) was fit to the new results provided by de Gelder and Vroomen. Of central interest is the nature of the bimodal performance as a function of the unimodal performance. The FLMP gave a good fit of performance. The description reveals that, although information differences exist across different instruction conditions, the information processing involved in pattern recognition appears to be the same and well-described by the FLMP.