The Ohio State University, United States of America.
University of Tennessee, United States of America.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2021 Jul;218:103336. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2021.103336. Epub 2021 May 18.
The current study examined how simple tones affect speeded visuomotor responses in a visual-spatial sequence learning task. Across the three reported experiments, participants were presented with a visual target that appeared in different locations on a touchscreen monitor and they were instructed to touch the visual targets as quickly as possible. Visual sequences were either paired with sounds that correlated with the location of the target, paired with sounds that did not correlate with the location of the target, or the sequences were presented in silence (baseline). Response times decreased across training and participants were slower to respond to the visual stimuli when the sequences were paired with tones. Moreover, these interference effects were more pronounced early in training and explicit instructions directing attention to the visual modality had little effect on eliminating auditory interference, suggesting that these interference effects may stem from bottom-up factors and do not appear to be under attentional control. These findings have implications on tasks that require the processing of simultaneously presented auditory and visual information and provide support for a proposed mechanism underlying auditory dominance on a task that is typically better suited for the visual modality.
本研究考察了单音如何影响视觉-空间序列学习任务中快速的运动反应。在三个报告的实验中，参与者在触摸屏上看到不同位置的视觉目标，并被指示尽快触摸这些视觉目标。视觉序列与目标位置相关的声音配对，与目标位置不相关的声音配对，或者序列在静音中呈现（基线）。随着训练的进行，反应时间逐渐减少，当序列与音调配对时，参与者对视觉刺激的反应速度变慢。此外，这些干扰效应在训练早期更为明显，并且明确指示将注意力集中在视觉模式上对消除听觉干扰几乎没有影响，这表明这些干扰效应可能源于自下而上的因素，并且似乎不受注意力控制。这些发现对需要同时处理听觉和视觉信息的任务有影响，并为在通常更适合视觉模式的任务中听觉优势的提出机制提供了支持。
