The impact of joint attention on the sound-induced flash illusions

Abstract

Humans coordinate their focus of attention with others, either by gaze following or prior agreement. Though the effects of joint attention on perceptual and cognitive processing tend to be examined in purely visual environments, they should also show in multisensory settings. According to a prevalent hypothesis, joint attention enhances visual information encoding and processing, over and above individual attention. If two individuals jointly attend to the visual components of an audiovisual event, this should affect the weighing of visual information during multisensory integration. We tested this prediction in this preregistered study, using the well-documented sound-induced flash illusions, where the integration of an incongruent number of visual flashes and auditory beeps results in a single flash being seen as two (fission illusion) and two flashes as one (fusion illusion). Participants were asked to count flashes either alone or together, and expected to be less prone to both fission and fusion illusions when they jointly attended to the visual targets. However, illusions were as frequent when people attended to the flashes alone or with someone else, even though they responded faster during joint attention. Our results reveal the limitations of the theory that joint attention enhances visual processing as it does not affect temporal audiovisual integration.

Individual differences do not mask effects of unconscious processing

“…showed significant sign consistency. This trend was further explored within each category, revealing significant effects in 89.19% 27.66%, and 46.67%, of the Confidence, Metacognitive Sensitivity, and Cognitive Psychology effects (four visual search effects and all three effects from Battich et al, 2021), compared with only 7.69% of the unconscious processing effects, as reported above (see Figure 4). These results validate the potential of using sign consistency to reveal effects on cognition and perception.…”

“…Metacognitive sensitivity was quantified as the area under the response-conditional type-2 Receiver Operating Characteristic curve (Meuwese et al, 2014; here we also excluded datasets that did not include accuracy scores; the remaining 47 effects were analyzed). Third, we grouped effects from the Reproducibility Project (Open Science Collaboration, 2015), the Classic Visual Search Effects open dataset (Adam et al, 2021), and a single study from the social media query (Battich et al, 2021) under a more general "Cognitive Psychology" category. For these studies, we tested the sign consistency of the effect tested by the original authors (averaged difference or interaction effects).…”

“…However, special care should be taken when interpreting non-directional test results, and when designing experiments targeting non-directional effects (see Box A for best-practice recommendations). A case in point can be found in Battich et al (2021), who examined the hypothesis that joint attention affects multisensory integration. Critically, this hypothesis was tested by comparing two social conditions that were counterbalanced across participants, such that for half of the participants a joint attention condition was performed before a baseline condition where participants performed the same task individually, and vice versa for the other half.…”

Differences in eccentricity for sound-induced flash illusion in four visual fields

“…Literature source 2°Wilkie et al, 2008;Nava et al, 2013;Brang et al, 2012;Pérez-Bellido et al, 20152.5°Gavin et al, 20223°Kostaki et al, 20164°Vanes et al, 20164.1°Balz et al, 2016;Keil & Senkowski, 2017;Kaiser et al, 2019;Scurry et al, 20214.17°Neufeld et al, 2012Haß et al, 20174.5°Bidelman, 2016Bidelman & Heath, 20184.75°Roseboom et al, 20135°Shams et al, 2000Tremblay et al, 2007;Innes-Brown & Crewther, 2009;Bolognini et al, 2011Bolognini et al, , 2013Bolognini et al, , 2016de Haas et al, 2012;Kumpik et al, 2014;Stapleton et al, 2014;Abadi & Murphy, 2014;Whittingham et al, 2014;Deloss & Andersen, 2015;Brighina et al, 2015;O'Brien et al, 2017;Gieseler et al, 2018;Huang et al, 2021;Battich et al, 2021;Gavin et al, 20225.1°Kawabe, 20095.5°Keil et al, 20135.67°Apthorp et al, 20136°van Der Smagt et al, 2007Takeshima & Gyoba, 20156.29°Wahn et al, 20206.3°Meylan & Murray, 20077°Wozny et al, 2008Rosenthal et al, 2009;Takeshima et al, 2013;…”