Introduction to the Special Issue: Forty Years of the McGurk Effect

In this special issue of Multisensory Research, we celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the publication in 1976 of the seminal paper by Harry McGurk and John MacDonald entitled “Hearing lips and seeing voices” (McGurk and MacDonald, 1976). The genesis of the special issue was a symposium honoring the anniversary at the fourteenth meeting of the International Multisensory Research Forum, held in Suzhou, China, in June of 2016 (Fig. 1). In the first article in the special issue, John MacDonald recounts the history of the original publication (MacDonald, 2018). John was a graduate research assistant in Harry McGurk’s laboratory at the University of Surrey, which studied the development in infants of the coordination between vision and hearing (what we would now term “multisensory integration”). Videotape technology had been recently developed, making it simpler to prepare and present audiovisual stimuli. To determine how infants perceived the incongruence between auditory and visual speech, Harry instructed John to make recordings of “baba” and “gaga” and arrange for the Audiovisual department to dub together congruent (auditory “baba” + visual “baba”, AbaVba) and incongruent (auditory “baba” + visual “gaga”, AbaVga) pairings of the syllables. John tells of his panic when on listening to the resulting incongruent recording, he instead heard something entirely different (“dada”). However, other observers experienced the same percept, and the finding was duly written-up and published in Nature. John touchingly devotes his article to the memory of his late mentor (who passed away in 1998 at age 62) and graciously reports that he has no hard feelings that the illusion has become known as the McGurk effect.