“She’s a waterfall”: motion after-effect and perceptual design in video games involving virtual musicianship

A particularly unpleasant version of motion aftereffect was revealed after extensively playing proprietary video games in which the task is to co-ordinate spatially distributed responses in time with music. During playing, key musical and rhythmic phrases descend as coloured shapes from the top of the screen. After playing, static text is presented that appears to slide upwards, reflecting a neural reaction contrary to the falling shapes. The game both serves as a contemporary example of motion aftereffect and also highlights certain cross-modal associations between space, time, and sound in the design of stimulus-response relations.