Examining the effect of age on auditory enhancement of visual-temporal attention

The dissociation of semantically congruent and incongruent cross-modal effects on the visual attentional blink

“…The behavioral data clearly showed that compared to the neutral sounds, the incongruent sounds boosted T2 discrimination to a lesser degree, while the congruent sounds boosted T2 discrimination to a higher degree. These findings replicate the alleviation of visual attentional blink induced by meaningless sounds (Olivers and Van der Burg, 2008;Thorne, 2013, 2015;Kranczioch et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2022) as well as the modulating effect of audiovisual semantic congruency (congruent vs. incongruent) on it (Adam and Noppeney, 2014;Zhao et al, 2021Zhao et al, , 2022. More importantly, these findings provide the first evidence that the modulation of audiovisual semantic congruency is bidirectional, containing not only a cost induced by the incongruent sounds but also an additional benefit induced by the congruent sounds.…”

“…In compliance with previous studies on the meaningless-soundinduced alleviation of visual attentional blink (Olivers and Van der Burg, 2008;Thorne, 2013, 2015;Kranczioch et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2022), the current study also used a pure tone to represent the meaningless, semantically neutral sound. Notwithstanding, one could argue that because some real-world objects may also make sounds like a pure tone (e.g., a telephone's call waiting sound), the tone used here might have still been perceived as somewhat semantically incongruent with the T2 stimulus set (i.e., dogs, cars, and drums).…”

“…The line drawings and object sounds were the same as those used in the Zhao et al (2021) study, and were also rated in terms of representativeness by an independent group of participants (see Supplementary materials for details). The pure tone was used as a semantically neutral sound because it was meaningless, carrying no semantic information, and previous studies on the meaninglesssound-induced alleviation of visual attentional blink (Olivers and Van der Burg, 2008;Thorne, 2013, 2015;Kranczioch et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2022) also used pure tones to represent semantically neutral sounds (for further discussion about this issue, see Section 4).…”

“…The attentional blink refers to a phenomenon in which we are usually unable to recognize the second of two visual targets (T1 and T2) if they are presented within a short interval of approximately 200-500 ms (Raymond et al, 1992). However, when a task-irrelevant and uninformative auditory tone is delivered synchronously with T2, the attentional blink will be greatly alleviated, which is evidenced by improved T2 discrimination during the short T1-to-T2 interval (Olivers and Van der Burg, 2008;Thorne, 2013, 2015;Kranczioch et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2022). Interestingly, although the attentional blink per se is well accepted as a suppression occurring late during the post-perceptual stage of processing (for reviews, see Martens and Wyble, 2010;Zivony and Lamy, 2022), the electrophysiological correlates of the auditory-induced alleviation of attentional blink have been shown to occur early during the perceptual stage (Kranczioch and Thorne, 2015).…”