Department of Psychology, University of Tübingen, Schleichstr. 4, 72076, Tübingen, Germany.
Exp Brain Res. 2019 Dec;237(12):3089-3098. doi: 10.1007/s00221-019-05654-4. Epub 2019 Sep 20.
Previous evidence suggests that people "hear" visual stimuli when encoding temporal information. This suggestion is based on the observation that auditory distractor information can strongly affect discrimination performance for visual temporal sequences. The present study aimed to replicate and extend this finding by investigating sequence discrimination within and across the two modalities. In two experimental series, participants judged whether two subsequently presented temporal sequences, a standard sequence followed by a comparison sequence, were identical or not. In Experimental Series A, irrelevant distractor information was presented simultaneously with the standard sequence. In Series B, the distraction appeared in the retention interval between the standard sequence and the comparison sequence. The results showed that auditory distraction impaired performance irrespective of whether the target sequences were auditory or visual, whereas visual distraction only impaired the discrimination of visual target sequences. Furthermore, auditory distraction was always at least as effective as visual distraction, irrespective of standard modality. Generally, discrimination performance was much better for auditory than for visual sequences. Overall, the present results are consistent with the idea that people code visual temporal information in the auditory modality. Moreover, the present study also suggests that such cross-modal interference effects should be interpreted cautiously with respect to their underlying timing mechanism because of the basic differences in temporal sensitivity between the two modalities.
先前的证据表明，人们在编码时间信息时“听到”视觉刺激。这一观点的依据是，听觉干扰信息会强烈影响视觉时间序列的辨别表现。本研究旨在通过研究两种模态内和模态间的序列辨别来复制和扩展这一发现。在两个实验系列中，参与者判断两个随后呈现的时间序列（标准序列后跟比较序列）是否相同。在实验系列 A 中，无关的干扰信息与标准序列同时呈现。在系列 B 中，干扰出现在标准序列和比较序列之间的保持间隔中。结果表明，听觉干扰会损害表现，无论目标序列是听觉还是视觉，而视觉干扰仅会损害视觉目标序列的辨别。此外，听觉干扰总是至少与视觉干扰一样有效，而不管标准模态如何。总体而言，听觉序列的辨别表现要好得多。总体而言，本研究结果与人们在听觉模式中对视觉时间信息进行编码的观点一致。此外，由于两种模态之间在时间敏感性方面存在基本差异，因此对于跨模态干扰效应的潜在时间机制，应谨慎解释此类干扰效应。
