Alignment of Continuous Auditory and Visual Distractor Stimuli Is Leading to an Increased Performance

Stefanie Mühlberg,Matthias M Müller

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00790

Abstract

Information across different senses can affect our behavior in both positive and negative ways. Stimuli aligned with a target stimulus can lead to improved behavioral performances, while competing, transient stimuli often negatively affect our task performance. But what about subtle changes in task-irrelevant multisensory stimuli? Within this experiment we tested the effect of the alignment of subtle auditory and visual distractor stimuli on the performance of detection and discrimination tasks respectively. Participants performed either a detection or a discrimination task on a centrally presented Gabor patch, while being simultaneously subjected to a random dot kinematogram, which alternated its color from green to red with a frequency of 7.5 Hz and a continuous tone, which was either a frequency modulated pure tone for the audiovisual congruent and incongruent conditions or white noise for the visual control condition. While the modulation frequency of the pure tone initially differed from the modulation frequency of the random dot kinematogram, the modulation frequencies of both stimuli could align after a variable delay, and we measured accuracy and reaction times around the possible alignment time. We found increases in accuracy for the audiovisual congruent condition suggesting subtle alignments of multisensory background stimuli can increase performance on the current task.

Highlights

In our inherently multisensory world, the selection and integration of information within and across senses is the foundation of perception
Performing a repeated measure analysis of variance (ANOVA) we found a main effect of task (F1,23 = 64,202, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.736), which revealed that participants performed more accurately in the detection task than in the discrimination task
We investigated the effects of subtle multisensory alignment upon focused attention by presenting two continuously modulated distractor stimuli that could align their frequency modulation (FM) frequency after a variable delay

Summary

INTRODUCTION

In our inherently multisensory world, the selection and integration of information within and across senses is the foundation of perception. Event-related potential (ERP) studies show that these distraction effects occur relatively early in cortical stimulus processing, by modulating the amplitude of the N2 and P3 ERP amplitudes (Bendixen et al, 2010; Demeter et al, 2016) In all these studies the stimulus is novel or very transient with a sudden onset, they cannot answer the question in how far a multisensory alignment of task irrelevant stimuli itself can capture attention and serve as a distractor. Considering that the alignment of distractor stimuli does not share any spatial or temporal properties with the target stimulus we hypothesize that the multisensory stimulus would serve as a distractor, decreasing the task performance and we are measuring the reaction times, accuracy and the time scale of the effect. In order to uncover the temporal dynamics of such an effect, target events at the centrally displayed task stimulus were presented at different time points after the auditory frequency change

Participants

RESULTS

DISCUSSION

ETHICS STATEMENT