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

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 v oice were presented under both unimodal and bimodal conditions. When partic ipants identified the affect, they were influenced by information from both modalities. This result occurred even when they were instructed to base th eir 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 mo del of perception (FLMP) was fit to the new results provided by de Gelder a nd 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 perfor mance. The description reveals that, although information differences exist across different instruction conditions, the information processing involv ed in pattern recognition appears to be the same and well-described by the FLMP.