Organic Interfaces; or, How Human Beings Augment Their Digital Devices

It is a central premise of the advertising campaigns for nearly all digital communication devices that buying them augments the user: they give us a larger, better memory; make us more “creative” and “productive”; and/or empower us to access whatever information we desire from wherever we happen to be. This study is about how recent popular cinema represents the failure of these technological devices to inspire the enchantment that they once did and opens the question of what is causing this failure. Using examples from the James Bond films, the essay analyzes the ways in which human users are frequently represented as the media connecting and augmenting digital devices and NOT the reverse. It makes use of the debates about the ways in which our subjectivity is itself a networked phenomenon and the extended mind debate from the philosophy of mind. It will prove (1) that this represents an important counter-narrative to the technophilic optimism about augmentation that pervades contemporary advertising, consumer culture, and educational debates; and (2) that this particular discourse of augmentation is really about technological advances and not advances in human capacity.

Multimodal Integration in Statistical Learning: Evidence from the McGurk Illusion

Recent advances in the field of statistical learning have established that learners are able to track regularities of multimodal stimuli, yet it is unknown whether the statistical computations are performed on integrated representations or on separate, unimodal representations. In the present study, we investigated the ability of adults to integrate audio and visual input during statistical learning. We presented learners with a speech stream synchronized with a video of a speaker's face. In the critical condition, the visual (e.g., /gi/) and auditory (e.g., /mi/) signals were occasionally incongruent, which we predicted would produce the McGurk illusion, resulting in the perception of an audiovisual syllable (e.g., /ni/). In this way, we used the McGurk illusion to manipulate the underlying statistical structure of the speech streams, such that perception of these illusory syllables facilitated participants' ability to segment the speech stream. Our results therefore demonstrate that participants can integrate audio and visual input to perceive the McGurk illusion during statistical learning. We interpret our findings as support for modality-interactive accounts of statistical learning.