Exposure to arousal-inducing sounds facilitates visual search

Erkin Asutay,Daniel Västfjäll

doi:10.1038/s41598-017-09975-8

Erkin Asutay, Daniel Västfjäll

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-09975-8

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Journal: Scientific Reports	Publication Date: Sep 4, 2017
Citations: 17	License type: open-access

Affiliation: Linköping University, Decision Research

Abstract

Exposure to affective stimuli could enhance perception and facilitate attention via increasing alertness, vigilance, and by decreasing attentional thresholds. However, evidence on the impact of affective sounds on perception and attention is scant. Here, a novel aspect of affective facilitation of attention is studied: whether arousal induced by task-irrelevant auditory stimuli could modulate attention in a visual search. In two experiments, participants performed a visual search task with and without auditory-cues that preceded the search. Participants were faster in locating high-salient targets compared to low-salient targets. Critically, search times and search slopes decreased with increasing auditory-induced arousal while searching for low-salient targets. Taken together, these findings suggest that arousal induced by sounds can facilitate attention in a subsequent visual search. This novel finding provides support for the alerting function of the auditory system by showing an auditory-phasic alerting effect in visual attention. The results also indicate that stimulus arousal modulates the alerting effect. Attention and perception are our everyday tools to navigate our surrounding world and the current findings showing that affective sounds could influence visual attention provide evidence that we make use of affective information during perceptual processing.

Highlights

Exposure to affective stimuli could enhance perception and facilitate attention via increasing alertness, vigilance, and by decreasing attentional thresholds
In the VA version, one of the four auditory stimuli were presented during visual fixation; and a visual search array appeared on the screen after the sound
The current studies aimed to investigate whether auditory-induced arousal could facilitate visual attention in a search task

Summary

Introduction

Exposure to affective stimuli could enhance perception and facilitate attention via increasing alertness, vigilance, and by decreasing attentional thresholds. Studies on healthy participants found that auditory phasic alerting could improve conscious visual perception[12] and increase attentional bias for salient visual stimuli[13] In these studies, the alerting cues (tone bursts with various durations) have no motivational or affective value. In the light of a previous experiment that found an opposite effect[19], the authors suggested that the phasic alertness effect might depend on central vision or audio-visual integration In these studies, participants responded to a single visual or auditory stimulus following an auditory-cue (looming or receding stimuli) by pressing a button

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