Visual dominance and attention in space

Abstract

When human subjects are presented a light and a tone simultaneously, each of which serves as a cue in a reaction time task, responding is predominantly to the light. This phenomenon has been referred to as visual dominance. The present experiment attempted to test the hypothesis that when subjects must divide their attention between different objects in space, the visual channel is favored over the auditory channel. Rather than the "free-field" method used in our earlier work, our procedure involved the use of earphones to deliver the auditory stimulus. The results provided a further indication of the robustness of the visual dominance effect. While there was a slight reduction in the magnitude of the effect, as compared with the "free-field" situation, responding was still predominantly to the visual stimulus. 261Previous studies conducted in our laboratory over the past several years have demonstrated that when human subjects are presented a light and a tone sirnultaneously, each of which individually serves as a cue in a reaction time (RT) task, subjects respond predominantly to the light. This visual dominance effect is seen to persist when the subjective intensity of the tone is double that of the light (Colavita, 1974) , when subjects are given verbal instructions to respond to the tone rather than to the light (Colavita, 1974), when the tone source rathe r than the light source is used as a visual fixation point (Colavita, Tomko , & Weisberg, 1976) , and when subjects are required to respond to stimulus offset rather than stimulus onset (Colavita & Weisberg, 1979) _ The purpose of the present experiment was to explore a further aspect of this visual dominance effect . More specifically, we wished to test the idea that the subject has a finite amount of attention to direct to objects in space and that, for some reason, the visual channel receives a disproportionate amount of this quantity, to the detriment of attention to auditory events in space.We felt that one way to test this idea would be to deliver the auditory stimulus directly to the subject's ears via earphones rather than "free field," as had been the method of tone presentation used in our earlier experiments. The use of earphones should free the subject from the necessity of attending to the location of the tone in space and , possibly, bring about some change in the visual dominan ce effect.Simple tonal RT is generally reported to be faster than simple light RT. However, in the case of simultaneous light-tone presentation (what we call conflict trials), the subject's responding is dominated by the visual stimulus. Possibly, freeing the subject from the task of dividing his or her attention between two points in space (i.e., the sound source and the light source) through the use of earphones will reduce or abolish the visual dominance effect due to the greater speed of simple tonal RT over simple visual RT. On the other hand , the Copyright 1982 The Psychonomic Society , Inc. use of earphones might permit the subject to direct all of his or he...

Reciprocal effects of visual and auditory stimuli in a spatial compatibility situation

“…This reciprocal effect of one modality upon the other appears very robust, inasmuch as it was significant for each individual subject. Thus, in the present study, no predominance of one modality over the other was observed, contrary to the strong visual predominance observed by Colavita (1974Colavita ( , 1982.…”

“…Experiments by Colavita (1974Colavita ( , 1982 showed visual predominance to be a strong effect. Replicating Colavita's results with variations in the experimental conditions, Posner, Nissen, and Klein (1976) and Egeth and Sager (1977) suggested that visual predominance may be caused by a general attentional bias toward the visual modality that would compensate for the apparently low alerting capability of visual signals.…”

“…Since visual predominance has been shown by Colavita (1974Colavita ( , 1982, Colavita, Tomko, and Weisberg (1976), Posner et al (1976), and Egeth and Sager (1977) to be a consistent and robust phenomenon, it would be of interest to know whether visual predominance would persist in situations of spatial incompatibility: How else could one explain that vision can be affected by simulta-VISUAL-AUDITORY SPATIAL COMPATIBILITY Figure 1. Average reaction time for the 8 subjects.…”

Differences in Sensorimotor Processing of Visual and Proprioceptive Stimuli

“…Todd (1912) using all combinations ofauditory, electric shock, and visual stimuli equated for intensity showed that responses to two or three stimuli presented simultaneously were always faster than the response to any of the stimuli presented alone. More recently, however, other investigators have shown that the presentation of visual and auditory stimuli simultaneously results in a response latency similar to that of the visual cue alone (Colavita, 1974(Colavita, , 1982Colavita & Weisberg, 1979;Egeth & Sager, 1977). While the individual may selectively attend to the visual sense to compensate for possible failures in the alerting mechanism associated with vision (Klein, 1977;Posner, Nissen, & Klein, 1976), there are obviously some key "hardware" advantages to attending to proprioception, especially when the imperative stimulus lies on the side ipsilateral to the response (d. Phillips, 1969).…”

Just how important is spatial coincidence to multisensory integration? Evaluating the spatial rule

“…Other evidence supporting a modest role of spatial coincidence on cross‐modal interactions comes from work on the Colavita visual dominance effect , . In a typical study, participants are presented with a random sequence of auditory and visual target stimuli.…”