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Coexistence of Multiple Modal Dominances

Coexistence of Multiple Modal Dominances Marvin Chandra (mchandra@hawaii.edu) Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii at Manoa 2530 Dole Street, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA Christopher W. Robinson (robinson.777@osu.edu) Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University 208F Ohio Stadium East, 1961 Tuttle Park Place Columbus, OH 43210, USA Scott Sinnett (ssinnett@hawaii.edu) Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii at Manoa 2530 Dole Street, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA Abstract Research has shown visual dominance effects by participants‟ inclination to focus on visual information when presented with compounded visual and auditory stimuli. A recent study has found auditory dominance through a passive oddball detection task. As this task did not require an explicit response, the first aim of this study was to require a response from the participant. Using a single-response oddball task, Experiment 1 found auditory dominance when examining response times to auditory and visual oddballs, and Experiment 2 confirmed the findings, even when visual stimuli were presented 100 ms prior to auditory. Experiment 3 extended the task to measure error rates, requiring participants to make separate responses for auditory, visual, and bimodal stimuli. Auditory dominance was eliminated with a reversal to visual dominance. The current study provides evidence for the coexistence of multiple sensory dominances. Mechanisms underlying sensory dominance and factors that may modulate sensory dominance are discussed. Keywords: Cross-modal processing; Sensory Dominance; Attention. Introduction Our multisensory milieu necessitates the interaction of information arriving at different sensory modalities to create the world we perceive. In fact, research involving multimodal presentations has highlighted brain specificity of multisensory relationships. For instance, imaging studies have shown that the combination of sensory stimuli arriving at different senses (e.g., visual and auditory stimuli) activates multisensory neurons in non-human mammals (Meredith & Stein, 1986), non-human primates (Hikosaka et al., 1988) and humans (Calvert et al., 2000). Behaviorally, this has been correlated with performance facilitation for multisensory presentations. For instance, Frassinetti and Bolognini (2002) demonstrated that the presentation of concurrent auditory stimuli reduces the threshold to detect visual items in a difficult detection task. In addition, Laurienti et al. (2004) found that presenting compound audiovisual stimuli prior to target unimodal visual stimuli reduced response latency to task targets. This decrease in reaction time was not observed when the audiovisual stimuli were replaced with an equivalent amount of unisensory stimuli (i.e., either two visual or two auditory stimuli). Facilitation is not the only consequence of multisensory exposure, however. Using detection tasks, Colavita (1974) documented competition between visual and auditory modalities when visual and auditory stimuli were simultaneously presented. Participants were asked to press a button when exposed to a sound, a separate button when exposed to a flash of light, and press both buttons for the simultaneous presentation of both the sound and the light. In trials with bimodal presentations, participants pressed the unisensory visual response button in 98% of the occurrences, despite faster reaction times being recorded for unisensory auditory responses when presented in isolation (i.e., they made visually biased errors, note recent demonstrations have shown no difference between unisensory response latencies). The robustness of this visual dominance effect has been observed in a number of recent investigations (see Spence, 2009 for a review). The dominance of the visual modality is not limited to detection tasks involving simple stimuli such as beeps and flashes. Sinnett, Spence, and Soto-Faraco (2007) required participants to respond to specific visual (i.e., the picture of a stoplight), auditory (i.e., the sound of a cat), or bimodal (i.e., the stoplight and cat simultaneously presented) stimuli embedded within a rapid serial presentation of pictures and sounds. In this case, errors to bimodal stimuli were statistically in favor of visual responses (i.e., visual dominance effect). Building upon this finding, Koppen, Alsius and Spence (2008) instructed participants to press one key for a visual stimulus (i.e., full color picture of an animal), another key for an auditory stimulus (i.e., sound of an animal) or both keys for bimodal presentations. Employing a small set of visual and auditory stimuli reproduced the visual dominance effect, however, increasing the set to include more stimuli magnified the effect leading to more visual only based responses (i.e., errors) when presented with bimodal stimuli. Recent investigations have explored to what degree the visual dominance effect can be modulated, in part to answer