Visual-auditory interaction in speeded classification: Role of stimulus difference

Abstract

An experiment examined cross-modal interference and congruence in speeded classification: Subjects had to identify compound (visual-auditory) stimuli as either low or high in spatial position (visualjudgment) or low or high in pitch (auditory judgment), in 16 conditions, each of which combined one of four possible pairs of tones, varying in frequency difference, with one of four possible pairs of dots, varying in positional difference. Both classification by position and classification by pitch revealed Garner interference (poorer performance than baseline, with orthogonal variation in the irrelevant dimension) and congruence effects (better performance with congruent than with incongruent stimulus combinations), but pitch classification showed more. Furthermore, the size of the pitch difference strongly affected classification by pitch and less strongly affected classification by position, but the size of the position difference affected neither. The findings are consistent with the view that Garner interference and congruence effects are closely related, perhaps arising from a common source, and suggest that the asymmetries could depend in part on the degree of dimensional overlap between stimuli and responses.Research in recent decades has revealed complex, and not yet well understood, interactions in the perceptual processing of multi modal and multidimensional stimuli. Especially notable is research concerning the extent to which different components of complex stimuli are attended selectively-that is, perceived distinctively-and how various experimental parameters, such as the task and the nature of the stimulus, affect attentional selectivity (

Evidence of stochastic resonance in an auditory discrimination task may reflect response bias

“…The experiments performed here and by others (Odgaard et al, 2003;Wang et al, 1998) indicate that psychophysical procedures failing to control for response biases can potentially yield invalid data and lead to incorrect conclusions. Marks (1993Marks ( , 1996Marks ( , 1997 and collaborators (Aylor & Marks, 1976;Ben-Artzi & Marks, 1995;Odgaard et al, 2003;Rankin & Marks, 1991) and others (Kuze, 1995;Ward, 1979) have repeatedly warned of the interaction between decisional processes and stimulus context in sensory data, and the results reported here speak in support of the widespread adoption of criterion-controlled methods such as ROC analysis. or do they stay constant, as suggested by the lowest three noise levels?…”

Does crossmodal correspondence modulate the facilitatory effect of auditory cues on visual search?

“…Many studies have demonstrated the existence of a relationship between auditory pitch and different visual features, such as spatial elevation (Ben-Artzi & Marks, 1995;Bernstein & Edelstein, 1971;Evans & Treisman, 2010;Melara & O'Brien, 1987;Patching & Quinlan, 2002;Rusconi, Kwan, Giordano, Umiltà, & Butterworth, 2006), brightness (Ludwig, Adachi, & Matzuzawa, 2011;Marks, 1987) or lightness (Hubbard, 1996;Marks, 1987;Martino & Marks, 1999;Melara, 1989;Mondloch & Maurer, 2004), size (Evans & Treisman, 2010;Gallace & Spence, 2006;Mondloch & Maurer, 2004), angularity of shape (Marks, 1987), direction of movement (Clark & Brownell, 1976), and even spatial frequency (Evans & Treisman, 2010).…”

Decomposing the Garner interference paradigm: Evidence for dissociations between macrolevel and microlevel performance

“…However, these intertrial contingencies also bring about an increase in stimulus uncertainty (Ben-Artzi & Marks, 1995: a larger number of stimulus tokens in the filtering condition (i.e., 4) relative to the baseline condition (i.e., 2). Although traditional condition-average performance cannot be used to separate out the contributions of irrelevant variation and stimulus uncertainty on any putative filtering cost, the recalculation of filtering costs according to intertrial contingency can.…”