Abstract
The current study used cross-modal oddball tasks to examine cardiac and behavioral responses to changing auditory and visual information. When instructed to press the same button for auditory and visual oddballs, auditory dominance was found with cross-modal presentation slowing down visual response times more than auditory response times (Experiment 1). When instructed to make separate responses to auditory and visual oddballs, visual dominance was found with cross-modal presentation decreasing auditory discrimination, and participants also made more visual-based than auditory-based errors on cross-modal trials (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 increased task demands while requiring a single button press and found evidence of auditory dominance, suggesting that it is unlikely that increased task demands can account for the reversal in Experiment 2. Auditory processing speed was the best predictor of auditory dominance, with auditory dominance being stronger in participants who were slower at processing the sounds, whereas auditory and visual processing speed and baseline heart rate variability did not predict visual dominance. Examination of cardiac responses that were time-locked with stimulus onset showed cross-modal facilitation effects, with auditory and visual discrimination occurring earlier in the course of processing in the cross-modal condition than in the unimodal conditions. The current findings showing that response demand manipulations reversed modality dominance and that time-locked cardiac responses show cross-modal facilitation, not interference, suggest that auditory and visual dominance effects may both be occurring later in the course of processing, not from disrupted encoding.
Highlights
IntroductionOver the last 40 years, there has been a growing body of research examining how sensory systems process and integrate incoming information (Stein and Meredeth, 1993; Lewkowicz, 1994, 2000; Lickliter and Bahrick, 2000; Calvert et al, 2004; Driver and Spence, 2004; Spence, 2009, 2018; Robinson and Sloutsky, 2010a; Spence et al, 2012)
We looked at three predictor variables that might be related to modality dominance: unimodal auditory processing speed, unimodal visual processing speed, and baseline heart rate variability (HRV)
Predictors of Modality Dominance As in previous experiments, we examined if HRV and processing speed could account for modality dominance
Summary
Over the last 40 years, there has been a growing body of research examining how sensory systems process and integrate incoming information (Stein and Meredeth, 1993; Lewkowicz, 1994, 2000; Lickliter and Bahrick, 2000; Calvert et al, 2004; Driver and Spence, 2004; Spence, 2009, 2018; Robinson and Sloutsky, 2010a; Spence et al, 2012). Speech perception, rhythm of a hammer tapping, identifying the location of car, and so on, can all be expressed in both the auditory and visual modalities, and numerous studies have shown that multisensory presentation can facilitate learning and speed up responses to redundant/amodal information compared to when the same information is presented to a single sensory modality (Miller, 1982; Giard and Peronnet, 1999; Bahrick and Lickliter, 2000; Bahrick et al, 2004; Molholm et al, 2004; Alsius et al, 2005; Colonius and Diederich, 2006; Sinnett et al, 2008). In situations where sensory modalities provide different or conflicting information, modality dominance effects can sometimes be observed with one modality attenuating processing in the other modality (Spence, 2009; Robinson and Sloutsky, 2010b; Spence et al, 2012). We examined speed of discrimination by collecting both behavioral responses and timelocked psychophysiological changes (i.e., cardiac responses) as participants discriminated oddballs from standards
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