The Audio-Visual Processing of Horror

Student: Timothy Perales
Major: Cognitive Behavioral Neuroscience
Advisors: John Neuhoff, Evan Wilhelms
The effects of fearful visual stimuli type and linearity or nonlinearity of audio stimuli was examined using a reaction time test. Participants were randomly assigned to conditions that contained either horror-film-type images or snake images as well as either a linear or nonlinear audio stimulus, and were tasked with determining whether there was a fearful (horror or snake) image present among multiple five image arrays. Descriptively, participants in non-horror visual conditions had faster average reaction times and participants in nonlinear audio conditions also had faster reaction times, however these differences were not found to be significant. Preliminary results suggest that ecological validity and arousal factors may contribute to differences in reaction time, but more research is necessary to confirm.

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