Abstract
Auditory and visual stimuli presented in the peripheral visual field were perceived as spatially coincident when the auditory stimulus was presented five to seven degrees outwards from the direction of the visual stimulus. Furthermore, judgments of the perceived distance between auditory and visual stimuli presented in the periphery did not increase when an auditory stimulus was presented in the peripheral side of the visual stimulus. As to the origin of this phenomenon, there would seem to be two possibilities. One is that the participants could not perceptually distinguish the distance on the peripheral side because of the limitation of accuracy perception. The other is that the participants could distinguish the distances, but could not evaluate them because of the insufficient experimental setup of auditory stimuli. In order to confirm which of these two alternative explanations is valid, we conducted an experiment similar to that of our previous study using a sufficient number of loudspeakers for the presentation of auditory stimuli. Results revealed that judgments of perceived distance increased on the peripheral side. This indicates that we can perceive discrimination between audio and visual stimuli on the peripheral side.