Bimodal and trimodal multisensory enhancement: Effects of stimulus onset and intensity on reaction time

Abstract

Manual reaction times to visual, auditory, and tactile stimuli presented simultaneously, or with a delay, were measured to test for multisensory interaction effects in a simple detection task with redundant signals. Responses to trimodal stimulus combinations were faster than those to bimodal combinations, which in turn were faster than reactions to unimodal stimuli. Response enhancement increased with decreasing auditory and tactile stimulus intensity and was a U-shaped function of stimulus onset asynchrony. Distribution inequality tests indicated that the multisensory interaction effects were larger than predicted by separate activation models, including the difference between bimodal and trimodal response facilitation. The results are discussed with respect to previous findings in a focused attention task and are compared with multisensory integration rules observed in bimodal and trimodal superior colliculus neurons in the cat and monkey.

Estimating the relative weights of visual and auditory tau versus heuristic-based cues for time-to-contact judgments in realistic, familiar scenes by older and younger adults

“…When performing other simple auditory-visual detection and discrimination tasks, healthy older adults have been shown to exhibit heightened sensory integration demonstrated by, for instance, proportionally faster response times in bimodal than in unimodal stimulus presentations than do younger adults (Diederich & Colonius, 2004;Laurienti, Burdette, Maldjian, & Wallace, 2006;Mozolic, Hugenschmidt, Peiffer, & Laurienti, 2012). These age-related differences in multisensory integration may, however, depend on the nature and complexity of the task and the types of sensory inputs available (e.g., Freiherr, Lundström, Habel, & Reetz, 2013;McGovern, Roudaia, Stapleton, McGinnity, & Newell, 2014).…”

Redundancy gain for semantic features

“…For instance, participants responded to the presentation of any visual (Fischer & Miller, 2008), auditory , or multimodal stimuli (Diederich & Colonius, 2004) or to specific target-defining features of stimuli like color and/or shape (Mordkoff & Danek, 2011). In a series of simple RT studies, however, Schröter and colleagues Schröter, Frei, Ulrich, & Miller, 2009;Schröter et al, 2007) demonstrated that redundant proximal targets are not sufficient to result in redundancy gain.…”

Impact of contingency manipulations on accessory stimulus effects

“…Such intersensory facilitation effects are quite robust, and they have been replicated in many different settings. For example, intersensory facilitation has been reported in tasks such as Todd's, in which participants must respond to stimuli from any modality (e.g., Diederich & Colonius, 2004;Gondan, Niederhaus, Rösler, & Röder, 2005;Hershenson, 1962;Miller, 1991). Intersensory facilitation has also been reported when instructionally irrelevant accessory stimuli on one modality (i.e., stimuli to which participants need not respond) are presented simultaneously with relevant target stimuli on another modality, especially when the irrelevant accessories are auditory stimuli (Bernstein, 1970;Doyle & Snowden, 2001).…”