Attention and visual dominance: A chronometric analysis.

Although it has been documented that musical training enhances multisensory integration, there is not yet a consensus as to how musical training influences the visual dominance effect in sensory dominance. The present study adopted the Colavita visual dominance paradigm, presenting auditory stimuli concurrent with visual stimuli, to investigate the visual dominance effect between music majors and nonmusic majors and compared the reaction time and response proportion of the two kinds of participants in the bimodal trials. The results showed that the proportion of simultaneous responses in bimodal trials of music majors is higher than that of nonmusic majors; the nonmusic majors show a greater difference between the proportion of “Visual-Auditory” trials and “Auditory-Visual” trials compared with the music majors; the ΔRT of the two responses of the nonsimultaneous bimodal trials of nonmusic majors is longer than that of music majors. The results indicated that musically trained individuals have an enhanced ability to bind visual and auditory information and show a lesser Colavita effect, that is, a reduced visual dominance effect, than their nonmusic major peers. We conclude that musical training extends beyond the field of vision or auditory domain, improves audiovisual integration, and reduces the visual dominance effect.

The simultaneous presentation of a visual and an auditory stimulus can lead to a decrease in people's ability to perceive or respond to the auditory stimulus. In this study, we investigate the effect that threat has upon this phenomenon, known as the Colavita visual dominance effect. Participants performed two blocks of trials containing 40% visual, 40% auditory, and 20% bimodal trials. The first block of trials was identical for all participants, while in the second block, either the visual stimulus (visual threat condition), auditory stimulus (auditory threat condition), or neither stimulus (control condition) was fear-conditioned using aversive electrocutaneous stimuli. We predicted that, when compared with the control condition, this visual dominance effect would increase in the visual threat condition and decrease in the auditory threat condition. This hypothesis was partially supported by the data. In particular, the results showed that the fear-conditioning of the visual stimulus significantly increased the visual dominance effect relative to the control condition. However, the fear-conditioning of the auditory stimulus did not reduce the visual dominance effect but instead increased it slightly. These findings are discussed in terms of the role that attention and arousal play in the dominance of vision over audition.

The current study used cross-modal oddball tasks to examine cardiac and behavioral responses to changing auditory and visual information. When instructed to press the same button for auditory and visual oddballs, auditory dominance was found with cross-modal presentation slowing down visual response times more than auditory response times (Experiment 1). When instructed to make separate responses to auditory and visual oddballs, visual dominance was found with cross-modal presentation decreasing auditory discrimination, and participants also made more visual-based than auditory-based errors on cross-modal trials (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 increased task demands while requiring a single button press and found evidence of auditory dominance, suggesting that it is unlikely that increased task demands can account for the reversal in Experiment 2. Auditory processing speed was the best predictor of auditory dominance, with auditory dominance being stronger in participants who were slower at processing the sounds, whereas auditory and visual processing speed and baseline heart rate variability did not predict visual dominance. Examination of cardiac responses that were time-locked with stimulus onset showed cross-modal facilitation effects, with auditory and visual discrimination occurring earlier in the course of processing in the cross-modal condition than in the unimodal conditions. The current findings showing that response demand manipulations reversed modality dominance and that time-locked cardiac responses show cross-modal facilitation, not interference, suggest that auditory and visual dominance effects may both be occurring later in the course of processing, not from disrupted encoding.

Two experiments examined the role of attention in visual dominance during motor learning. On the movement task 10 acquisition trials were given; each included a movement presentation and a blindfolded reproduction. After completion of acquisition trials and a 5-min. interval, subjects were given 5 retention trials with reproduction attempts only. In Exp. 1, subjects receiving only kinesthetic information during movement presentation reproduced criterion movement length more accurately than subjects receiving visual and kinesthetic information. Other subjects, presented both visual and kinesthetic stimuli for the movement, were given instructions to ignore vision and focus on kinesthesis. These subjects exhibited no effects of visual dominance in reproductions. In Exp. 2, subjects were presented visual and kinesthetic stimuli during half of the movement presentations and only kinesthetic stimuli during the other half. They did not exhibit the effects of visual dominance in reproductions. Such effects in motor learning may be modified by manipulation of attention or an alternating presentation of specific sensory stimuli.

Bandler and Grinder (1975) proposed the construct "most highly valued representational systems" to describe auditory, visual, and kinesthetic perceptual orientations among individuals. They set forth a predicate method for determining an individual's primary representational system. Contrary to Bandler and Grinder's construct, experimental evidence consistently supports the principle of visual dominance among humans. In order to test the effectiveness of Bandler and Grinder's constructs, 221 volunteers were screened by an alternate predicate method. 22 subjects were selected as "highly auditory" and 19 subjects were selected as "highly visual." These 41 subjects were asked to give their first impressions to 75 simultaneous, audio-visual presentations of letters, numbers, and words. Twenty-five of the simultaneous presentations were discrepant. Subjects were then individually interviewed. Their verbal responses to standardized questions were tape recorded. Four questions were examined. (1) Do the verbs, adverbs, and adjectives expressed by subjects in their taped interviews yield discrete classifications of primary representational systems by Bandler and Grinder's predicate method? (2) Do the predicate-method classifications correlate with the screening classifications derived by the alternate predicate method? (3) Do predicate-method classifications indicate whether individuals will make auditory or visual responses to the twenty-five discrepant presentations of auditory and visual stimuli? (4) Will subjects classified as auditory or visual respectively resort to auditory or visual responses with greater frequency as task and stimulus difficulty are increased over the five series of discrepant stimulus presentations? Predicate tabulations indicated that the majority of individuals could not be effectively classified by Bandler and Grinder's predicate method. A point biserial correlation was performed using the auditory and visual screening classifications and the proportion of auditory predicates expressed during the experimental interviews. No relationship was found between the two methods of classification. Attentional responses were analyzed by a 2 x 5 repeated measures ANOVA. No significant relationships were found between predicate-method classifications and responses to the discrepant stimulus presentations. Though a significant interaction resulted, the pattern of the means across the five tasks was not the pattern predicted. There was no significant relationship between predicate-method classifications and attentional responses across increasingly difficult tasks. The major finding of the study was a visual dominance effect. Thirty-six of the thirty-seven subjects responded more frequently to the visual stimuli than to the auditory stimuli on discrepant presentations. 92% of the possible 925 responses were visual, supporting the generalizability of the visual dominance principle to an experimental paradigm in which televised linguistic

Many researchers have taken the Colavita effect to represent a paradigm case of visual dominance. Broadly defined, the effect occurs when people fail to respond to an auditory target if they also have to respond to a visual target presented at the same time. Previous studies have revealed the remarkable resilience of this effect to various manipulations. In fact, a reversal of the Colavita visual dominance effect (i.e., auditory dominance) has never been reported. Here, we present a series of experiments designed to investigate whether it is possible to reverse the Colavita effect when the target stimuli consist of repetitions embedded in simultaneously presented auditory and visual streams of stimuli. In line with previous findings, the Colavita effect was still observed for an immediate repetition task, but when an n-1 repetition detection task was used, a reversal of visual dominance was demonstrated. These results suggest that masking from intervening stimuli between n-1 repetition targets was responsible for the elimination and reversal of the Colavita visual dominance effect. They further suggest that varying the presence of a mask (pattern, conceptual, or absent) in the repetition detection task gives rise to different patterns of sensory dominance (i.e., visual dominance, an elimination of the Colavita effect, or even auditory dominance).

The purpose of this study was to compare visual with kinesthetic instruction for learning a motor skill that is not visually monitorable. Previous studies comparing visual and kinesthetic information have all used arm tasks for which the nonvisual condition was artificial. 20 subjects were randomly assigned to either a kinesthetic or a visual instruction group. The task was to draw a horizontal line with the right foot while in a quadruped position. All subjects received visual knowledge of results. While performance improved over the course of the 10 instructional sessions and trials, no difference in performance was found between the two instructional groups. A follow-up study is required to determine whether this result was based on visual dominance. Understanding the effectiveness of the different modalities for teaching gross motor skills would be valuable to physical therapists, physical educators, and psychologists.

Visual--auditory (VA) and visual--proprioceptive (VP) localization conflict paradigms were varied to explore the comparability of the conflict situations. In experiment 1 various attempts were made to decrease the dominance of visual information over proprioceptive and auditory target information. Pairing auditory with proprioceptive information against conflicting visual information did not lessen the visual dominance, nor did dimming the visual field. A 'cognitive' manipulation, in which the subject was led to doubt the reliability of the visual information, reduced visual dominance over audition but not visual dominance over proprioception. This difference between the two conflict situations was further explored and corroborated in experiment 2. In experiment 3 no attempt was made to lead the subject to believe that paired discrepant targets were related, and the visual dominance of audition was strong while the visual dominance of proprioception did not occur. The apparent differences between the VA and VP conflict situations are discussed with regard to the feability of generating a unitary explanation of localization conflict results. Several further factors are discussed that must be explored before undertaking such a unitary formulation.

The results of this study suggest that information derived from kinesthetic inputs alone is not normally used to generate an estimate of the location of the hand in extrapersonal space. This finding provides support for the interpretation of previous results suggesting that a representation of a visual target in extrapersonal space must be transformed into a kinesthetic reference frame before the parameters of a targeted arm movement can be computed (Soechting and Flanders, 1989b). We asked subjects to use a pointer to indicate the spatial location of their hand following an unseen passive displacement. We found that subjects had large errors in the locations that they chose and that there was a large degree of variability for repeated trials with the same hand location. The errors were a result neither of using the pointer to indicate a spatial locus nor of an inability to make use of kinesthetic information. Instead, the errors resulted from an inability of subjects to synthesize an estimate of the hand's spatial location from only kinesthetic cues. We also asked subjects to use the pointer to indicate the location of their hand following a passive displacement when they had visual information about the passive displacement. In this case, we found that subjects performed better than when they had only kinesthetic information, but not as well as when they had only visual information about target location. This finding suggests that kinesthetic information about target location affects the processing of visual information.

Combination of visual and kinesthetic information is essential to perceive bodily movements. We conducted behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments to investigate the neuronal correlates of visuokinesthetic combination in perception of hand movement. Participants experienced illusory flexion movement of their hand elicited by tendon vibration while they viewed video-recorded flexion (congruent: CONG) or extension (incongruent: INCONG) motions of their hand. The amount of illusory experience was graded by the visual velocities only when visual information regarding hand motion was concordant with kinesthetic information (CONG). The left posterolateral cerebellum was specifically recruited under the CONG, and this left cerebellar activation was consistent for both left and right hands. The left cerebellar activity reflected the participants' intensity of illusory hand movement under the CONG, and we further showed that coupling of activity between the left cerebellum and the “right” parietal cortex emerges during this visuokinesthetic combination/perception. The “left” cerebellum, working with the anatomically connected high-order bodily region of the “right” parietal cortex, participates in online combination of exteroceptive (vision) and interoceptive (kinesthesia) information to perceive hand movement. The cerebro–cerebellar interaction may underlie updating of one's “body image,” when perceiving bodily movement from visual and kinesthetic information.

Synchronous and asynchronous presentations of auditory and visual signals: Implications for control console design

Conventionally, hitting movements in response to different advanced kinematic information have been investigated from the perspective of chronometric analysis, such as measuring the timing of movements. This is the first study to investigate the effect of manipulating advanced kinematic information on the hitting movement pattern organization based on both kinematics and kinetic analyses in addition to the conventional chronometric analysis. Specifically, the hitting movement of experienced batters in response to visual stimuli consisting of different pitching movement speeds with the same ball trajectory information was measured by an optical motion capture camera system and a foot force sensor inside the shoes. The occurrence timings of specific events (e.g., movement initiation), some kinematic parameters (e.g., maximum rotate angle of the shoulder and hip), and the balance of the ground reaction force between the ball of the big and small toes of both feet were compared between experimental conditions. This was done to test the hypothesis that the hitting movement is coupled with the visual information given to batters based on an expert anticipatory model. The results indicated that for a faster pitching speed, the batter tended to react with a significantly smaller preparatory movement (e.g., smaller weight shift and shoulder rotate angle during backswing) and put significantly larger weight on the rear foot during the swing execution phase. The situation was exactly reverse in the case of a slower pitching movement. These results suggest for the first time that manipulating advanced kinematic information not only affects the timing of the movement, but also the whole-body kinematics and lower body kinetics. The results also indicate that the hitting movement pattern of experienced batters is highly dependent on the advanced kinematic information.

The three previous sections provided compelling evidence that the body is a special object of perception. This is most obvious for one’s own body where additional sensory channels provide tactile and kinesthetic information that can be multimodally integrated with visual information (see chapter 2). These and other sources result in structural descriptions of the body, or body represenutations, that serve to organize bodily information (chapter 7). Because of their unique structure, others’ bodies are also special objects of perception (chapter 12). Hard-wired brain circuits capture specific body configurations and body postures.

This theoretical article examines the epistemological underpinnings of perceptual training in additional language phonetic-phonological learning. It investigates three central concepts from Direct Realism in Speech Perception—’affordances,’ ‘abilities,’ and ‘events’—and proposes a higher-order affordance, termed ‘speakability,’ that encompasses lower-order, constituent affordances such as gesturability and expressability. These lower-order affordances can be enhanced through laboratory-based training, thereby promoting the exercise of speakability. Based on the premise that human perceptual abilities can be improved through training (E. J. Gibson & Pick, 2000; Chemero, 2009; Gibson, 1966), our theoretical argument explores how additional language learners, whose perceptual systems are attuned to their primary language patterns, may benefit from training in detecting and calibrating new additional language-specific visual, acoustic, and kinesthetic information. This fine-tuning process supports the accurate perception of the target language. Given the reciprocal nature of the perception–action cycle—where perception guides action and action provides new perceptual information (E. J. Gibson & Pick, 2000)—, we argue that perceptual training is consistent with Direct Realist principles. Even when artificial or manipulated speech data are used in laboratories, the perception of characteristic additional language actions through screens or headphones still occurs directly and can guide learners in detecting and actualizing new affordances. We posit that learners’ relations with artificial speech data promote the perception of new affordances, thereby improving the execution of language-specific articulatory gestures.

Visual information had been found to be superior to textual information in enhancing processing ease, preference, attitude, and purchase intention. However, these visual format’s superior effects were mainly established for hedonic products (e.g. jackets, crackers) without a clear measure of objective decision quality. In complex decision environments (e.g. healthcare and credit card), it is unclear whether the visual advantage persists – especially when objective decision quality is a more important outcome than attitude or behavioral intentions. This research addresses this gap and examines the effect of visual vs. textual information on measures of objective decision quality in three different decision tasks (i.e. health insurance, credit card, jacket). The empirical findings suggest that the visual advantage does not extend to objective decision quality as measured by (i) the proportion to choose a dominant alternative within a choice task, and (ii) the proportion to remain with the chosen alternative when a change is allowed. Additionally, the findings show that an individual’s confidence in his/her chosen alternative was higher in the visual than textual condition for the jacket but not for health insurance and credit card decision tasks. The findings also provide evidence supporting the visual advantage effects on subjective measures of perceived time spent on task, attitude, and purchase intention.