Redundant target effect and intersensory facilitation from visual-tactile interactions in simple reaction time

Abstract

In a simple reaction time (RT) task, normal observers responded faster to simultaneous visual and tactile stimuli than to single visual or tactile stimuli. RT to simultaneous visual and tactile stimuli was also faster than RT to simultaneous dual visual or tactile stimuli. The advantage for RT to combined visual-tactile stimuli over RT to the other types of stimulation could be accounted for by intersensory neural facilitation rather than by probability summation. The direction of gaze (and presumably of visual attention) to space regions near to or far from the site of tactile stimulation had no effect on tactile RT. However, RT to single or dual tactile stimuli was fastest when observers could see the sites of tactile stimulation on their hands both directly and through a mirror at the same time. All these effects can be ascribed to the convergence of tactile and visual inputs onto neural centers which contain flexible multimodal representations of body parts.

Effects of redundant visual stimuli on temporal order judgments

“…This speedup with redundant stimuli is often called the redundant stimulus effect (RSE), and it is a very general phenomenon. It has been observed with redundant visual stimuli (e.g., Miller, 1982;Schwarz & Ischebeck, 1994) and with redundant stimuli in two or three different modalities (e.g., Diederich, 1992;Diederich & Colonius, 1987;Forster, Cavina-Pratesi, Aglioti, & Berlucchi, 2002;Raab, 1962;Todd, 1912). Analogous speedups with redundant stimuli have also been observed in go/no-go tasks (e.g., Mordkoff & Yantis, 1991) and in choice RT tasks (e.g., Grice, Canham, & Boroughs, 1984).…”

“…Redundant stimuli may speed processing at more than one stage of processing, and the affected stages could depend on the task (e.g., stimuli and responses). For example, redundancy gain seems to be greater when redundant stimuli are presented in different sensory modalities than when they are presented in the same modality (e.g., Forster et al, 2002), raising the possibility that between-and within-modality redundancy gain may be produced somewhat differently. Perhaps most seriously, though, attempts to localize the effects of redundant stimuli on the speed of processing in individual stages are hampered by the difficulty of isolating the time consumed by particular stages within the overall RT, which necessarily includes both perceptual and motor components.…”

Familiarity of objects affects susceptibility to the sound-induced flash illusion

“…As a consequence familiar objects in this task may be locally as opposed to globally processed [11]. In this case the temporal interactions between beeps and visual stimuli may be altered.…”

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

“…(e.g., Forster et al, 2002;Miller, 1982Miller, , 1986Townsend & Nozawa, 1995). Here, we go beyond this practice (1) in extending the test to three modalities and (2) in developing a specific method to test for a trimodal effect that is not predictable from the bimodal response enhancements.…”

“…Many subsequent studies have replicated this redundant signals effect (RSE) for cross-modal stimuli (e.g., Corballis, 1998;Diederich & Colonius, 1987;Giray & Ulrich, 1993;Hughes, ReuterLorenz, Nozawa, & Fendrich, 1994;Miller, 1982Miller, , 1986Plat, Praamstra, & Horstink, 2000;Schwarz & Ischebeck, 1994), mostly with visual-auditory stimulus combinations, but also for unimodal stimulus combinations (Marzi et al, 1996;Murray, Foxe, Higgins, Javitt, & Schroeder, 2001). Recently, visual-tactile combinations have been studied as well (Amlôt, Walker, Driver, & Spence, 2003;Diederich, Colonius, Bockhorst, & Tabeling, 2003;Forster, Cavina-Pratesi, Aglioti, & Berlucchi, 2002).…”