Approximately 40 years of research on modality dominance has shown that humans are inclined to focus on visual information when presented with compounded visual and auditory stimuli. The current paper reports a series of experiments showing evidence of both auditory and visual dominance effects. Using a behavioral oddball task, we found auditory dominance when examining response times to auditory and visual oddballs-simultaneously presenting pictures and sounds slowed down responses to visual but not auditory oddballs. However, when requiring participants to make separate responses for auditory, visual, and bimodal oddballs, auditory dominance was eliminated with a reversal to visual dominance (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 replicated auditory dominance and showed that increased task demands and asking participants to analyze cross-modal stimuli conjunctively (as opposed to disjunctively) cannot account for the reversal to visual dominance. Mechanisms underlying sensory dominance and factors that may modulate sensory dominance are discussed.

Although reports that men and women differ in spatial ability are common, recent research examining stress effects on spatial navigation have not included analyses of gender differences. The current study investigated cue perception and mental rotation after an acute cold-water hand immersion stress in 156 undergraduates from the western United States. Gender differences were observed in spatial performance and spatial anxiety. Discriminant analysis revealed that distal gradient cue identification and mental rotation reaction times as well as spatial anxiety differed among men and women exposed to the acute stress and their warm-water hand immersion controls. These results indicate that stress differentially alters spatial performance in men and women, and underscores the importance of assessing gender differences when examining spatial ability.

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