Sound enhances visual perception: Cross-modal effects of auditory organization on vision.

Abstract

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Auditory, tactile, and multisensory cues facilitate search for dynamic visual stimuli

“…If the nonvisual cues facilitate participants' performance in a bottom-up manner, perhaps by increasing the saliency of the visual target (see, e.g., Stein, London, Wilkinson, & Price, 1996;Van der Burg et al, 2008 relative to the visual distractors, one might expect the bimodal cues to facilitate visual search more than the unimodal cues do. If, however, the nonvisual cues facilitate participants' performance in more of a top-down manner, perhaps by providing the participants with some sort of temporal marker about when the target color change will occur (see Van der Burg et al, 2008;Vroomen & de Gelder, 2000), one might expect a bimodal cue not to be any more effective than the best of the unimodal cues, since both types of cues would most likely provide equivalent temporal information to the participant.…”

“…No further improvements in participants' visual search performance were observed with the multisensory (audiotactile) cues in the present study, but it is important to note that overall performance was still significantly better than in the no-cue condition and comparable to that seen in the two other unimodal-cue conditions. Thus, rather than increasing the saliency of the visual target in a bottom-up manner, it appears that the nonvisual cues used in the present study facilitated participants' visual search performance in more of a topdown manner, possibly by providing the participants with a temporal marker indicating when the target color change was likely to occur (see Vroomen & de Gelder, 2000).…”

“…Van der Burg and colleagues ruled out the possibility that the cues merely had a crossmodal alerting effect (cf. McDonald, Teder-Sälejärvi, & Hillyard, 2000;Spence & Driver, 1994Vroomen & de Gelder, 2000) by showing that auditory cues did not give rise to a visual search benefit if they were presented 150 msec prior to the change of the color of the target (see Van der Burg et al, 2008, Experiment 3). Instead, the greatest improvements in participants' visual search performance were reported when the auditory cue and target color change were presented simultaneously or within 50 msec of each other (see Van der Burg et al, 2008, Experiment 3).…”

“…1 The present study was designed to replicate and extend Van der Burg et al's (2008) findings using the auditory-visual pip-and-pop and vibrotactile-visual poke-and-pop paradigms to explore how visual search performance is modulated by cues that were not only temporally synchronous (presented in synchrony with the color change of the visual target) but also spatially informative with regard to the likely location of the target (in the left or right hemifield). The benefits of having auditory or tactile cues that are either temporally synchronous (e.g., Chan & Chan, 2006;Dalton & Spence, 2007;Van der Burg et al, 2008Vroomen & de Gelder, 2000) or spatially informative (Ho, Santangelo, & Spence, 2009;Ho, Tan, & Spence, 2006;Perrott et al, 1996;Perrott et al, 1991) have been repeatedly demonstrated trade-offs (see Spence, Kingstone, Shore, & Gazzaniga, 2001;Townsend & Ashby, 1983). IE scores were calculated by dividing each participant's mean RT for each condition by their proportion of correct responses for that condition.…”

“…Spatially uninformative auditory and vibrotactile cues have also been shown to facilitate participants' visual search performance when they are temporally synchronized with a change in the target stimulus (e.g., Bolognini, Frassinetti, Serino, & Làdavas, 2005;Chan & Chan, 2006;Van der Burg, Olivers, Bronkhorst, & Theeuwes, 2008Vroomen & de Gelder, 2000). For example, Van der Burg et al (2008) measured search latencies for visual targets presented in a frequently changing central search field.…”