Reversing the Colavita visual dominance effect

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.

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.

Two experiments were performed to determine the effect of active auditory exploration (head movement) on visual and auditory dominance. In each experiment subjects located a small audio speaker unimodally or bimodally. On the bimodal trials a modality discordance was created by requiring prismatic viewing. Half the subjects in each experiment remained unaware of the discordance while the other half were informed that a prism was used, and its refracting properties were demonstrated. The second experiment differed from the first by allowing observers free head movement during target localization which was transduced and recorded electromechanically. The results indicated that knowledge of modality discordance greatly reduced visual bias of audition for observers with heads immobilized, but did not affect auditory bias of vision significantly. Observers permitted head movement but not provided with knowledge of discordance demonstrated visual bias which was substantially reduced from that found in the first experiment for no-knowledge subjects. Observers who were permitted head movement and provided with knowledge of discordance demonstrated no visual bias or auditory bias. Head movements were executed systematically, when permitted, and resulted in an increase in the precision of auditory localizations and a reduction in the biasing effect of vision. In contrast, head movement did not affect the precision of visual localizations. Results are discussed in terms of current hypotheses regarding perceptual dominance.

Three chronometric experiments, each comparing vision and kinesthesis, were conducted to study visual dominance. The time required to switch attention from vision and from kinesthesis was equal, while switching to kinesthesis was faster than switching to vision (Experiment 1). Responses to a combined visual-kinesthetic stimulus were slower than responses to a kinesthetic stimulus alone when the subject was expecting the bimodal stimulus. The visual dominance effect was shown to depend on the subject knowing the modality of the stimulus in advance (Experiment 2). When subjects were instructed to attend one modality they had equal difficulty with conflicting visual and kinesthetic information (Experiment 3). These findings suggest that visual dominance results from a bias to attend vision when that modality seems adequate for the task. Te bias to attend vision may develop to overcome a deficiency in visual alerting.

ABSTRACTSide dominance (upper and lower extremities, visual and auditory dominance) of 3,474 subjects of different age groups (9–83 years) was assessed using a 22-item questionnaire. Data were analyzed using a trichotomous (left, mixed, and right) association analysis among indices of side dominance. The contingency coefficients showed significantly high association between hand and foot preference across age groups compared to other paired associations of side dominance. A general rightward shift was observed with increasing age in all forms of side dominance.

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

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.

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

Dominance in arguing mixed-sex dyads: Visual dominance patterns, talking time, and speech loudness

The N170 component of the event-related potential (ERP) reflects experience-dependent neural changes in several forms of visual expertise, including expertise for visual words. Readers skilled in writing systems that link characters to phonemes (i.e., alphabetic writing) typically produce a left-lateralized N170 to visual word forms. This study examined the N170 in three Japanese scripts that link characters to larger phonological units. Participants were monolingual English speakers (EL1) and native Japanese speakers (JL1) who were also proficient in English. ERPs were collected using a 129-channel array, as participants performed a series of experiments viewing words or novel control stimuli in a repetition detection task. The N170 was strongly left-lateralized for all three Japanese scripts (including logographic Kanji characters) in JL1 participants, but bilateral in EL1 participants viewing these same stimuli. This demonstrates that left-lateralization of the N170 is dependent on specific reading expertise and is not limited to alphabetic scripts. Additional contrasts within the moraic Katakana script revealed equivalent N170 responses in JL1 speakers for familiar Katakana words and for Kanji words transcribed into novel Katakana words, suggesting that the N170 expertise effect is driven by script familiarity rather than familiarity with particular visual word forms. Finally, for English words and novel symbol string stimuli, both EL1 and JL1 subjects produced equivalent responses for the novel symbols, and more left-lateralized N170 responses for the English words, indicating that such effects are not limited to the first language. Taken together, these cross-linguistic results suggest that similar neural processes underlie visual expertise for print in very different writing systems.

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.

For both humans and other animals, the abilities to integrate separate sound elements over time into coherent perceptual representations, or ‘auditory streams’, and to segregate these auditory streams from other interleaved sounds are critical for hearing and vocal communication. In humans and European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) the ability to perceptually segregate a simple interleaved tone sequence comprised of two alternating tones differing in frequency (ABA–ABA–ABA–...) into separate auditory streams of A and B tones is promoted at larger frequency separations (ΔF) between the A and B tones. In humans, segregating A and B tones into different streams also appears to be promoted at shorter interstimulus intervals (ISI) between tones within a stream (e.g., between consecutive A tones). Here, we used the ABA experimental paradigm to investigate the influence of different time intervals between A and B tones in repeated ABA triplets on neural responses in the starling forebrain. The main finding from the study is that a ΔF-dependent effect of ISI had a large influence on the relative responses to A and B tones. Responses to B tones were suppressed, relative to A-tone responses, when the A and B tones were more similar in frequency (smaller ΔFs) and occurred at shorter ISIs. We attribute these suppressive effects to physiological forward masking and suggest that forward masking functions as a mechanism for segregating neural responses to interleaved tones in tonotopic space. We discuss the relevance of our physiological data with respect to previous electrophysiological studies of auditory stream segregation in mammals and previous perceptual studies in humans.

The role of task repetition in L2 performance development: What needs to be repeated during task-based interaction?

To investigate the basis of crossmodal visual distractor congruency effects, we recorded event-related brain potentials (ERP) while participants performed a tactile location-discrimination task. Participants made speeded tactile location-discrimination responses to tactile targets presented to the index fingers or thumbs while ignoring simultaneously presented task-irrelevant visual distractor stimuli at either the same (congruent) or a different (incongruent) location. Behavioural results were in line with previous studies, showing slowed response times and increased error rates on incongruent compared with congruent visual distractor trials. To clarify the effect of visual distractors on tactile processing, concurrently recorded ERPs were analyzed for poststimulus, preresponse, and postresponse modulations. An enhanced negativity was found in the time range of the N2 component on incongruent compared with congruent visual distractor trials prior to correct responses. In addition, postresponse ERPs showed the presence of error-related negativity components on incorrect-response trials and enhanced negativity for congruent-incorrect compared with incongruent-incorrect trials. This pattern of ERP results has previously been related to response conflict (Yeung, Botvinick, & Cohen, 2004). Importantly, no modulation of early somatosensory ERPs was present prior to the N2 time range, which may have suggested the contribution of other perceptual or postperceptual processes to crossmodal congruency effects. Taken together, our results suggest that crossmodal visual distractor effects are largely due to response conflict.