Audiovisual interactions depend on context of congruency

Abstract

In this study, we addressed how the particular context of stimulus congruency influences audiovisual interactions. We combined an audiovisual congruency task with a proportion-of-congruency manipulation. In Experiment 1, we demonstrated that the perceived duration of a visual stimulus is modulated by the actual duration of a synchronously presented auditory stimulus. In the following experiments, we demonstrated that this crossmodal congruency effect is modulated by the proportion of congruent trials between (Exp. 2) and within (Exp. 4) blocks. In particular, the crossmodal congruency effect was reduced in the context with a high proportion of incongruent trials. This effect was attributed to changes in participants' control set as a function of the congruency context, with greater control applied in the context where the majority of the trials were incongruent. These data contribute to the ongoing debate concerning crossmodal interactions and attentional processes. In sum, context can provide a powerful cue for selective attention to modulate the interaction between stimuli from different sensory modalities.Keywords Crossmodal interactions . Visual perception . Audition . Congruency context . Multisensory processing Research in the field of cognitive control has been tightly linked to the study of stimulus congruency. The present research aimed to study the interplay between audiovisual interactions and attentional control processes driven by changes in context-that is, the relative proportions of congruent and incongruent trials.In a typical congruency task (e.g., a Stroop task), two stimulus dimensions, one task-relevant and one taskirrelevant, can be congruent (triggering the same response) or incongruent (triggering incompatible responses). For example, in the Stroop task, the colour word and the colour in which the word is written can be congruent (e.g., red written in red) or incongruent (e.g., red written in blue). The difference in performance between congruent and incongruent trials (i.e., faster response times [RTs] and higher response accuracy on congruent trials) is called the congruency effect. It is argued (e.g., Botvinick, Cohen, & Carter, 2004;Egner & Hirsch, 2005) that the size of the congruency effect reflects the level of control that the participant exerts to avoid the interference of irrelevant information while making a fast and accurate response. According to this view, the larger the size of the congruency effect, the more interference has occurred, and thus, the less control was exerted.A number of studies have shown that the congruency effect can vary as a function of the proportion of congruent trials. In a seminal study, Logan and Zbrodoff (1979) manipulated the proportions of congruent and incongruent trials presented in a Stroop task, finding a decreased congruency effect in those blocks of trials with a higher proportion of incongruent items. The authors (see also Lindsay & Jacoby, 1994) concluded that this proportion-congruent effect was due to changes in word-reading st...

Priming of Control: Implicit Contextual Cuing of Top-down Attentional Set

“…The proposal that context-specific improvements in interference resolution reflect implicit “priming of control” is supported by findings suggesting that the behavioral phenomenon occurs in the absence of awareness regarding contextual variation of conflict frequency (Crump et al, 2006; Heinemann et al, 2009; Sarmiento et al, 2011). In line with these previous results, only one out of twenty-five participants in the current experiment reported noticing the location-based manipulation of conflict frequency in our post-test survey (Materials and Methods).…”

Inharmonic music elicits more negative affect and interferes more with a concurrent cognitive task than does harmonic music

“…This bewildering quality of dissonant music might further contribute to the information complexity of dissonant intervals, producing cognitive demands on the listener that consonant, harmonic music does not. Consistent with these possibilities is a large body of literature showing that behavioral responses to complex (Patten, Kircher, Oslund, & Nilsson, 2004), ambiguous (MacDonald, Just, & Carpenter, 1992), conflicting (Eriksen & Eriksen, 1974;MacLeod, 1991;Sarmiento, Shore, Milliken & Sanabria, 2012;Stroop 1935), and unexpected (Crump, Gong, & Milliken, 2006, Jonides 1981Posner, Snyder, & Davidson, 1980;) stimuli take more time and are often less accurate than responses to simple, unambiguous, non-conflicting, and expected stimuli.…”

The interactions of multisensory integration with endogenous and exogenous attention

“…Studies have suggested that changing the proportion of congruent trials will result in shifts in attentional control and will thus indirectly modulate the outcome of multisensory integration (Sarmiento et al, 2012). This indirect modulation effect has also been demonstrated when the spread of attention across modalities, space and time was investigated (Busse et al, 2005; Donohue et al, 2011; Fiebelkorn et al, 2010), as discussed in section 5 .…”