Poth Christian H
Department of Psychology and Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology, Bielefeld University, P.O. box 10 01 31, D-33501, Bielefeld, Germany.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2020 Jun;82(3):1196-1204. doi: 10.3758/s13414-019-01825-1.
Humans respond faster to visual target stimuli when these are accompanied by auditory accessory stimuli. This accessory stimulus effect occurs even though accessory stimuli do not predict which response has to be made. Similar performance benefits occur when auditory stimuli serve as so-called alerting cues by preceding rather than accompanying the visual targets. This latter effect is attributed to phasic alertness, a short-lived increase of the brain's readiness for responding to external information. Phasic alertness and accessory stimulation each have been studied extensively, but it is unclear how the two work in concert. Therefore, the present study investigated how auditory alerting modulates the effects of subsequent accessory stimuli accompanying the targets of a visual choice reaction task. Results showed that accessory stimuli helped performance in the absence of alerting cues but impaired performance when alerting cues had been presented beforehand (Experiment 1). This reversed accessory stimulus effect did not seem due to expectations regarding the combination of accessory stimuli and alerting cues (Experiment 2). Together, the present findings reveal that phasic alertness changes the effects of accessory stimulation in a qualitative fashion: Alerting turns the otherwise helping accessory stimulus into a saboteur of performance.
当视觉目标刺激伴有听觉辅助刺激时，人类对视觉目标刺激的反应更快。即使辅助刺激并不能预测需要做出哪种反应，这种辅助刺激效应依然会出现。当听觉刺激在视觉目标之前而非伴随视觉目标出现，作为所谓的警觉线索时，也会出现类似的表现提升。后一种效应归因于相位警觉，即大脑对外部信息做出反应的准备状态的短暂增强。相位警觉和辅助刺激都已得到广泛研究，但尚不清楚二者是如何协同作用的。因此，本研究调查了听觉警觉如何调节随后伴随视觉选择反应任务目标的辅助刺激的效果。结果表明，在没有警觉线索的情况下，辅助刺激有助于提高表现，但在事先呈现警觉线索时则会损害表现（实验1）。这种反向的辅助刺激效应似乎并非源于对辅助刺激和警觉线索组合的预期（实验2）。总之，本研究结果表明，相位警觉以一种定性的方式改变了辅助刺激的效果：警觉将原本起帮助作用的辅助刺激变成了表现的破坏者。
