Abstract
The sensory dominance effect refers to the phenomenon that one sensory modality more frequently receives preferential processing (and eventually dominates consciousness and behavior) over and above other modalities. On the other hand, hand dominance is an innate aspect of the human motor system. To investigate how the sensory dominance effect interacts with hand dominance, we applied the adapted Colavita paradigm and recruited a large cohort of healthy right-handed participants (n = 119). While the visual dominance effect in bimodal trials was observed for the whole group (n = 119), about half of the right-handers (48%) showed a visual preference, i.e., their dominant hand effect manifested in responding to the visual stimuli. By contrast, 39% of the right-handers exhibited an auditory preference, i.e., the dominant hand effect occurred for the auditory responses. The remaining participants (13%) did not show any dominant hand preference for either visual or auditory responses. For the first time, the current behavioral data revealed that human beings possess a characteristic and persistent preferential link between different sensory modalities and the dominant vs. non-dominant hand. Whenever this preferential link between the sensory and the motor system was adopted, one dominance effect peaks upon the other dominance effect’s best performance.
Highlights
The sensory dominance effect refers to the phenomenon that one sensory modality more frequently receives preferential processing over and above other modalities
Was significantly larger in the VA (RTa > RTv = 134 ms) than AV trials (RTv > RTa = 98 ms), t(118) = 8.27, p < 0.001, d = 0.758, indicating that the size of visual dominance effect in the VA trials was significantly larger than the size of auditory dominance effect in the AV trials (Fig. 2a, right)
The main effect of the response hand was not significant, F(1,118) = 1.81, p = 0.181, ηp2 = 0.015, suggesting that no significant reaction times (RTs) difference was found for the dominant hand (640 ± 10 ms) as compared to the non-dominant hands (642 ± 10 ms) for the present whole group of 119 right handers (Fig. 2a, left)
Summary
The sensory dominance effect refers to the phenomenon that one sensory modality more frequently receives preferential processing (and eventually dominates consciousness and behavior) over and above other modalities. The current behavioral data revealed that human beings possess a characteristic and persistent preferential link between different sensory modalities and the dominant vs non-dominant hand. Whenever this preferential link between the sensory and the motor system was adopted, one dominance effect peaks upon the other dominance effect’s best performance. Please note that to perform a behavioral task successfully, all bottom-up sensory inputs from different modalities need to be transformed into their corresponding sensorimotor representations, e.g., via the visual or the auditory dorsal pathway[11,12,13,14,15] It remains poorly understood how the sensorimotor processes contribute to the sensory dominance effect. No consistent dominant-hand benefits will be found at the group level, for neither the visual nor the auditory modality, when data from right-handers with different hand-modality preferences are collapsed
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