Colavita Visual Dominance Effect Research Articles

Endogenous Spatial Attention Modulates the Magnitude of the Colavita Visual Dominance Effect.

The Colavita effect refers to the phenomenon wherein people tend to not respond to an auditory stimulus when a visual stimulus is simultaneously presented. Although previous studies have shown that endogenous modality attention influences the Colavita effect, whether the Colavita effect is influenced by endogenous spatial attention remains unknown. In the present study, we established endogenous spatial cues to investigate whether the size of the Colavita effect changes under visual or auditory cues. We measured three indexes to investigate the effect of endogenous spatial attention on the size of the Colavita effect. These three indexes were developed based on the following observations in bimodal trials: (a) The proportion of the “only vision” response was significantly higher than that of the “only audition” response; (b) the proportion of the “vision precedes audition” response was significantly higher than that of the “audition precedes vision” response; and (c) the reaction time difference of the “vision precedes audition” response was significantly higher than that of the “audition precedes vision” response. Our results showed that the Colavita effect was always influenced by endogenous spatial attention and that its size was larger at the cued location than at the uncued location; the cue modality (visual vs. auditory) had no effect on the size of the Colavita effect. Taken together, the present results shed light on how endogenous spatial attention affects the Colavita effect.

Stimulus temporal uncertainty balances intersensory dominance.

Vision is typically dominant over audition or touch in human adults. One classic example is the Colavita visual dominance effect: The presentation of a tone sometimes goes undetected when it is paired with a flash even though it is well detected when presented alone. We investigated whether the Colavita visual dominance effect is modulated by stimulus uncertainty in the temporal and spatial domains. In a simple discrimination task, participants were asked to press a predesignated key when detecting a flash, another key when detecting a tone, and both keys when detecting both a flash and a tone. Temporal uncertainty was increased by introducing temporal jitter between trials (Experiment 1), and spatial uncertainty was increased by shifting the flash to different locations (Experiment 2). The Colavita visual dominance effect was reduced when temporal uncertainty was increased, while it remained similar when spatial uncertainty was increased. We therefore demonstrate a novel consideration, where increasing temporal uncertainty balances the competition between vision and audition, suggesting that people's degree of sensory dominance is malleable. Our result therefore highlights the concept that intersensory competition is susceptible to the temporal predictability of the stimulus, which provides critical insights into the design of effective warning systems in the field of ergonomics.

Semantic congruency and the (reversed) Colavita effect in children and adults

When presented with auditory, visual, or bimodal audiovisual stimuli in a discrimination task, adults tend to ignore the auditory component in bimodal stimuli and respond to the visual component only (i.e., Colavita visual dominance effect). The same is true for older children, whereas young children are dominated by the auditory component of bimodal audiovisual stimuli. This suggests a change of sensory dominance during childhood. The aim of the current study was to investigate, in three experimental conditions, whether children and adults show sensory dominance when presented with complex semantic stimuli and whether this dominance can be modulated by stimulus characteristics such as semantic (in)congruency, frequency of bimodal trials, and color information. Semantic (in)congruency did not affect the magnitude of the auditory dominance effect in 6-year-olds or the visual dominance effect in adults, but it was a modulating factor of the visual dominance in 9-year-olds (Conditions 1 and 2). Furthermore, the absence of color information (Condition 3) did not affect auditory dominance in 6-year-olds and hardly affected visual dominance in adults, whereas the visual dominance in 9-year-olds disappeared. Our results suggest that (a) sensory dominance in children and adults is not restricted to simple lights and sounds, as used in previous research, but can be extended to semantically meaningful stimuli and that (b) sensory dominance is more robust in 6-year-olds and adults than in 9-year-olds, implying a transitional stage around this age.

Reversing the Colavita visual dominance effect

Many researchers have taken the Colavita effect to represent a paradigm case of visual dominance. Broadly defined, the effect occurs when people fail to respond to an auditory target if they also have to respond to a visual target presented at the same time. Previous studies have revealed the remarkable resilience of this effect to various manipulations. In fact, a reversal of the Colavita visual dominance effect (i.e., auditory dominance) has never been reported. Here, we present a series of experiments designed to investigate whether it is possible to reverse the Colavita effect when the target stimuli consist of repetitions embedded in simultaneously presented auditory and visual streams of stimuli. In line with previous findings, the Colavita effect was still observed for an immediate repetition task, but when an n-1 repetition detection task was used, a reversal of visual dominance was demonstrated. These results suggest that masking from intervening stimuli between n-1 repetition targets was responsible for the elimination and reversal of the Colavita visual dominance effect. They further suggest that varying the presence of a mask (pattern, conceptual, or absent) in the repetition detection task gives rise to different patterns of sensory dominance (i.e., visual dominance, an elimination of the Colavita effect, or even auditory dominance).

Extending visual dominance over touch for input off the body

Vision tends to dominate over touch in the majority of experimental situations, particularly when visual information is presented on, or near to, the body. We combined two visual dominance paradigms in order to investigate crossmodal interactions between vision and touch for stimuli on versus off the body: 1) The Colavita visual dominance effect, which has recently been extended to vision and touch, and 2) The rubber hand illusion, which has often been used to probe visuotactile interactions. Specifically, we investigated whether moving a visual stimulus off the participant's body would affect visual dominance, and how this dominance would be mediated by the presence/absence of a rubber hand (given the rubber hand illusion provides a way of extending the representation of one's own body in space). Participants made speeded detection/discrimination responses to a random sequence of visual-only, tactile-only, and visuotactile targets. While participants responded near-perfectly on the unimodal target trials, their performance on the visuotactile target trials was deleteriously affected by the simultaneous presentation of a visual stimulus on (as opposed to away from) their body. In particular, when the visual stimulus was presented to their fingertip, participants failed to respond to far more of the tactile than visual stimuli on bimodal trials. The magnitude of this visual dominance effect decreased significantly when the visual stimulus was moved off the body. When a rubber hand was placed at the off-body location, a similar (albeit reduced) visual dominance effect was observed in both positions. These results therefore suggest that visuotactile interactions are strongest when visual stimuli are presented on a body (no matter whom that body, or body-part, belongs to).

Repetition blindness and the Colavita effect

People often fail to respond to an auditory target if they have to respond to a visual target presented at the same time, a phenomenon known as the Colavita visual dominance effect. To date, the Colavita effect has only ever been demonstrated in detection tasks in which participants respond to pre-defined visual, auditory, or bimodal audiovisual target stimuli. Here, we tested the Colavita effect when the target was defined by a rule, namely the repetition of any event (a picture, a sound, or both) in simultaneously-presented streams of pictures and sounds. Given previous findings that people are better at detecting auditory repetitions than visual repetitions, we expected that the Colavita visual dominance effect might disappear (or even reverse). Contrary to this prediction, however, visual dominance (i.e., the typical Colavita effect) was observed, with participants still neglecting significantly more auditory events than visual events in response to bimodal targets. The visual dominance for bimodal repetitions was observed despite the fact that participants missed significantly more unimodal visual repetitions than unimodal auditory repetitions. These results therefore extend the Colavita visual dominance effect to a domain where auditory dominance has traditionally been observed. In addition, our results reveal that the Colavita effect occurs at a more abstract, rule-based, level of representation than tested in previous research.

A signal detection study of the Colavita visual dominance effect

When presented with auditory, visual, or bimodal audiovisual stimuli in a speeded detection/discrimination task, participants fail to respond to the auditory component of the bimodal targets significantly more often than they fail to respond to the visual component. Signal detection theory (SDT) was used to explore the contributions of perceptual (sensitivity shifts) and decisional (shifts in response criteria) factors to this effect, known as the Colavita visual dominance effect. Participants performed a version of the Colavita task that had been modified to allow for SDT analyses. The participants had to detect auditory and visual targets (presented unimodally or bimodally) at their individually determined 75% detection thresholds. The results showed a significant decrease in participants' sensitivity to auditory stimuli when presented concurrently with visual stimuli (in the absence of any significant change in their response criterion), suggesting that Colavita visual dominance does not simply reflect a decisional effect, but can be explained, at least in part, as a truly perceptual phenomenon. The decrease in sensitivity (to auditory stimuli) may be attributable to the exogenous capture of participants' attention by the visual component of the bimodal target, thus leaving fewer attentional resources for the processing of the auditory stimulus. The reduction in auditory sensitivity reported here may be considered an example of crossmodal masking.

Is visual dominance modulated by the threat value of visual and auditory stimuli?

The simultaneous presentation of a visual and an auditory stimulus can lead to a decrease in people's ability to perceive or respond to the auditory stimulus. In this study, we investigate the effect that threat has upon this phenomenon, known as the Colavita visual dominance effect. Participants performed two blocks of trials containing 40% visual, 40% auditory, and 20% bimodal trials. The first block of trials was identical for all participants, while in the second block, either the visual stimulus (visual threat condition), auditory stimulus (auditory threat condition), or neither stimulus (control condition) was fear-conditioned using aversive electrocutaneous stimuli. We predicted that, when compared with the control condition, this visual dominance effect would increase in the visual threat condition and decrease in the auditory threat condition. This hypothesis was partially supported by the data. In particular, the results showed that the fear-conditioning of the visual stimulus significantly increased the visual dominance effect relative to the control condition. However, the fear-conditioning of the auditory stimulus did not reduce the visual dominance effect but instead increased it slightly. These findings are discussed in terms of the role that attention and arousal play in the dominance of vision over audition.

When vision ‘extinguishes’ touch in neurologically-normal people: extending the Colavita visual dominance effect

Research has shown that people fail to report the presence of the auditory component of suprathreshold audiovisual targets significantly more often than they fail to detect the visual component in speeded response tasks. Here, we investigated whether this phenomenon, known as the "Colavita effect", also affects people's perception of visuotactile stimuli as well. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants made speeded detection/discrimination responses to unimodal visual, unimodal tactile, and bimodal (visual and tactile) stimuli. A significant Colavita visual dominance effect was observed (i.e., participants failed to respond to touch far more often than they failed to respond to vision on the bimodal trials). This dominance of vision over touch was significantly larger when the stimuli were presented from the same position than when they were presented from different positions (Experiment 3), and still occurred even when the subjective intensities of the visual and tactile stimuli had been matched (Experiment 4), thus ruling out a simple intensity-based account of the results. These results suggest that the Colavita visual dominance effect (over touch) may result from a competition between the neural representations of the two stimuli for access to consciousness and/or the recruitment of attentional resources.

The co-occurrence of multisensory competition and facilitation

Previous studies of multisensory integration have often stressed the beneficial effects that may arise when information concerning an event arrives via different sensory modalities at the same time, as, for example, exemplified by research on the redundant target effect (RTE). By contrast, studies of the Colavita visual dominance effect (e.g., [Colavita, F. B. (1974). Human sensory dominance. Perception & Psychophysics, 16, 409–412]) highlight the inhibitory consequences of the competition between signals presented simultaneously in different sensory modalities instead. Although both the RTE and the Colavita effect are thought to occur at early sensory levels and the stimulus conditions under which they are typically observed are very similar, the interplay between these two opposing behavioural phenomena (facilitation vs. competition) has yet to be addressed empirically. We hypothesized that the dissociation may reflect two of the fundamentally different ways in which humans can perceive concurrent auditory and visual stimuli. In Experiment 1, we demonstrated both multisensory facilitation (RTE) and the Colavita visual dominance effect using exactly the same audiovisual displays, by simply changing the task from a speeded detection task to a speeded modality discrimination task. Meanwhile, in Experiment 2, the participants exhibited multisensory facilitation when responding to visual targets and multisensory inhibition when responding to auditory targets while keeping the task constant. These results therefore indicate that both multisensory facilitation and inhibition can be demonstrated in reaction to the same bimodal event.

Audiovisual asynchrony modulates the Colavita visual dominance effect

Participants presented with unimodal auditory, unimodal visual, or bimodal audiovisual stimuli in a speeded discrimination task, fail to respond to the auditory component of bimodal targets significantly more often than they fail to respond to the visual component. We explored the influence of temporal factors on this phenomenon, known as the Colavita visual dominance effect. Participants performed a temporal order judgment (TOJ) task followed by the Colavita task. The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the auditory and visual components of the bimodal targets was varied and the results showed that the point at which the Colavita effect disappeared was correlated with the point at which participants started to reliably perceive the auditory stimulus as coming first. Furthermore, no Colavita effect was observed at those SOAs where the participants always perceived the visual stimulus as having come first. These results are explained in terms of the unity effect; that is, the Colavita visual dominance effect occurs within the temporal window in which participants bind auditory and visual stimuli into a single multisensory perceptual event. However, within this window, the Colavita effect is larger when the visual (rather than the auditory) stimulus is presented first.

Semantic congruency and the Colavita visual dominance effect

Participants presented with auditory, visual, or bimodal audiovisual stimuli in a speeded discrimination task, fail to respond to the auditory component of bimodal targets significantly more often than to the visual component, a phenomenon known as the Colavita visual dominance effect. Given that spatial and temporal factors have recently been shown to modulate the Colavita effect, the aim of the present study, was to investigate whether semantic congruency also modulates the effect. In the three experiments reported here, participants were presented with a version of the Colavita task in which the stimulus congruency between the auditory and visual components of the bimodal targets was manipulated. That is, the auditory and visual stimuli could refer to the same or different object (in Experiments 1 and 2) or audiovisual speech event (Experiment 3). Surprisingly, semantic/stimulus congruency had no effect on the magnitude of the Colavita effect in any of the experiments, although it exerted a significant effect on certain other aspects of participants' performance. This finding contrasts with the results of other recent studies showing that semantic/stimulus congruency can affect certain multisensory interactions.

Assessing the role of stimulus probability on the Colavita visual dominance effect

Participants presented with unimodal auditory (A), unimodal visual (V), or bimodal audiovisual stimuli (AV) in a task in which they have to identify the modality of the targets as rapidly as possible, fail to respond to the auditory component of bimodal targets significantly more often than they fail to respond to the visual component. In the majority of published studies on this phenomenon, known as the Colavita effect, the auditory, visual, and bimodal stimuli have been presented in the ratio 40A:40V:20AV. In the present study, we investigated whether the relatively low frequency with which the bimodal targets in previous studies have been presented may have contributed to participants’ difficulty in responding to such targets correctly. We manipulated the bimodal target probability by presenting the stimuli in the ratios 20A:20V:60AV, in Experiment 1; 5A:5V:90AV, 25A:25V:50AV, and 45A:45V:10AV, in Experiment 2. A significant Colavita visual dominance effect was observed when the bimodal targets were presented on 60% of the trials or less. We suggest that increasing the frequency of bimodal targets may have provided an exogenous cue to performance, that reduced the necessity for endogenous attention when selecting the appropriate response to make to bimodal targets.

Seeing the light: exploring the Colavita visual dominance effect

The Colavita visual dominance effect refers to the phenomenon whereby participants presented with unimodal auditory, unimodal visual, or bimodal audiovisual stimuli in a speeded discrimination task, fail to respond to the auditory component of bimodal targets significantly more often than they fail to respond to the visual component. The Colavita effect was demonstrated in this study when participants were presented with unimodal auditory, unimodal visual, or bimodal stimuli (in the ratios 40:40:20, Experiment 1; or 33:33:33, Experiment 2), to which they had to respond by pressing an auditory response key, a visual response key, or both response keys. The Colavita effect was also demonstrated when participants had to respond to the bimodal targets using a dedicated third (bimodal) response key (Experiment 3). These results therefore suggest that stimulus probability and the response demands of the task do not contribute significantly to the Colavita effect. In Experiment 4, we investigated what role exogenous attention toward a sensory modality plays in the Colavita effect. A significantly larger Colavita effect was observed when a visual cue preceded the bimodal target than when an auditory cue preceded it. This result suggests that the Colavita visual dominance effect can be partially explained in terms of the greater exogenous attention-capturing qualities of visual versus auditory stimuli.

Spatial coincidence modulates the Colavita visual dominance effect

The Colavita visual dominance effect refers to the phenomenon whereby participants presented with auditory, visual, or audiovisual stimuli in a speeded response task sometimes fail to respond to the auditory component of the bimodal targets. We conducted an experiment on the Colavita effect in which the auditory and visual components of the bimodal targets were presented from either the same or different positions (sides) at one of two eccentricities (13° or 26°). Participants were presented with auditory, visual, and bimodal stimuli to which they had to respond by pressing an auditory response key, a visual response key, or both response keys, respectively. On bimodal trials, participants failed to respond to the auditory stimulus significantly more often than they failed to respond to the visual stimulus, resulting in a significant Colavita visual dominance effect. The Colavita effect was significantly larger when the stimuli were presented from the same position than when they were presented from different positions. These results provide the first empirical evidence that the Colavita effect is modulated by the spatial coincidence of the auditory and visual stimuli.