Koppen Camille, Spence Charles
Crossmodal Research Laboratory, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3UD, UK.
Exp Brain Res. 2007 Jul;180(4):737-54. doi: 10.1007/s00221-007-0894-3. Epub 2007 Feb 27.
The Colavita visual dominance effect refers to the phenomenon whereby participants presented with unimodal auditory, unimodal visual, or bimodal audiovisual stimuli in a speeded discrimination task, fail to respond to the auditory component of bimodal targets significantly more often than they fail to respond to the visual component. The Colavita effect was demonstrated in this study when participants were presented with unimodal auditory, unimodal visual, or bimodal stimuli (in the ratios 40:40:20, Experiment 1; or 33:33:33, Experiment 2), to which they had to respond by pressing an auditory response key, a visual response key, or both response keys. The Colavita effect was also demonstrated when participants had to respond to the bimodal targets using a dedicated third (bimodal) response key (Experiment 3). These results therefore suggest that stimulus probability and the response demands of the task do not contribute significantly to the Colavita effect. In Experiment 4, we investigated what role exogenous attention toward a sensory modality plays in the Colavita effect. A significantly larger Colavita effect was observed when a visual cue preceded the bimodal target than when an auditory cue preceded it. This result suggests that the Colavita visual dominance effect can be partially explained in terms of the greater exogenous attention-capturing qualities of visual versus auditory stimuli.
科拉维塔视觉优势效应指的是在快速辨别任务中，向参与者呈现单峰听觉、单峰视觉或双峰视听刺激时，他们未能对双峰目标的听觉成分做出反应的频率显著高于未能对视觉成分做出反应的频率这一现象。在本研究中，当向参与者呈现单峰听觉、单峰视觉或双峰刺激（比例分别为40:40:20，实验1；或33:33:33，实验2），他们必须通过按下听觉反应键、视觉反应键或两个反应键来做出反应时，科拉维塔效应得到了证明。当参与者必须使用专门的第三个（双峰）反应键对双峰目标做出反应时（实验3），科拉维塔效应也得到了证明。因此，这些结果表明刺激概率和任务的反应要求对科拉维塔效应没有显著贡献。在实验4中，我们研究了对外在感官模态的注意在科拉维塔效应中所起的作用。当双峰目标之前出现视觉提示时，观察到的科拉维塔效应显著大于之前出现听觉提示时。这一结果表明，科拉维塔视觉优势效应可以部分地从视觉刺激比听觉刺激具有更强的外在注意捕获特性的角度来解释。
