The Effect of Auditory Stimulation upon the Critical Flicker Frequency for Different Regions of the Visible Spectrum

Abstract

Despite the appearance from time to time during the past seventy-Eve years of reports on sensory interaction, these relationships have been little more than an obscure problem of tangential interest to Western psychologists.1 The term 'inter-sensory effect' has been applied to a variety of phenomena: some related to associative memory, others reflecting the operation of attitudinal variables or set, still others that are classed as purely sensory events.2 The ambiguous status of this area is probably attributable to the prevalence of conflicting empirical reportsa and to the absence of an adequate conceptual framework within which to accommodate positive findings. Sensory psychology has been marked by a peripheralism, probably the result of a misinterpretation of the doctrine of specific energy of nerves,4 that, short of an assumption of centrifugal excitation, renders any consideration of intermodal effects meaningless; but there have been changes in the idiom of both psychology and physiology e.g. Lorente's principle of reciprocity, Hebb's concepts of cell assembly and phase-sequence, Werner and Wapner's sensory-tonic theory of perception, Helson's adaptation-level, and Magoun's studies of the reticular activating system-that make a meaningful approach to the phenomenon more accessible. Still, these can, for the moment, only provide a congenial climate for investigation. None allows confident prediction of the wide variety of specific effects that have been reported. Explanations, where they are found Kravkov's hypothesis concerning the eSect of sound on visual acuity constitutes an example6-are formulated, for the most part, in terms of the particulars of the test-situation.