Crossmodal facilitation of masked visual target identification

In the present study, participants identified the location of a visual target presented in a rapidly masked, changing sequence of visual distractors. In Experiment 1, we examined performance when a high tone, embedded in a sequence of low tones, was presented in synchrony with the visual target and...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Attention, perception & psychophysics perception & psychophysics, 2010-10, Vol.72 (7), p.1938-1947
Main Authors: Ngo, Mary Kim, Spence, Charles
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustic Stimulation
Adolescent
Adult
Attention
Behavioral Science and Psychology
Biological and medical sciences
Cognitive Psychology
Cues
Experiments
Female
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Male
Multimodal perception
Orientation
Pattern Recognition, Visual
Perception
Perceptions
Perceptual Masking
Pitch Discrimination
Psychology
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Psychophysics
Sound
Stimuli
Touch
Vision
Young Adult
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:In the present study, participants identified the location of a visual target presented in a rapidly masked, changing sequence of visual distractors. In Experiment 1, we examined performance when a high tone, embedded in a sequence of low tones, was presented in synchrony with the visual target and observed that the high tone improved visual target identification, relative to a condition in which a low tone was synchronized with the visual target, thus replicating Vroomen and de Gelder’s (2000, Experiment 1) findings. In subsequent experiments, we presented a single visual, auditory, vibrotactile, or combined audiotactile cue with the visual target and found similar improvements in participants’ performance regardless of cue type. These results suggest that crossmodal perceptual organization may account for only a part of the improvement in participants’ visual target identification performance reported in Vroomen and de Gelder’s original study. Moreover, in contrast with many previous crossmodal cuing studies, our results also suggest that visual cues can enhance visual target identification performance. Alternative accounts for these results are discussed in terms of enhanced saliency, the presence of a temporal marker, and attentional capture by oddball stimuli as potential explanations for the observed performance benefits.
ISSN:1943-3921
1943-393X
DOI:10.3758/APP.72.7.1938