Three experiments investigated cross-modal links between touch, audition, and vision in the control of covert exogenous orienting. In the first two experiments, participants made speeded discrimination responses (continuous vs. pulsed) for tactile targets presented randomly to the index finger of either hand. Targets were preceded at a variable stimulus onset asynchrony (150,200,or 300msec) by a spatially uninformative cue that was either auditory (Experiment 1) or visual (Experiment 2) on the same or opposite side as the tactile target. Tactile discriminations were more rapid and accurate when cue and target occurred on the same side, revealing cross-modal covert orienting. In Experiment 3, spatially uninformative tactile cues were presented prior to randomly intermingled auditory and visual targets requiring an elevation discrimination response (up vs. down). Responses were significantly faster for targets in both modalities when presented ipsilateral to the tactile cue. These findings demonstrate that the peripheral presentation of spatially uninformative auditory and visual cues produces crossmodal orienting that affects touch, and that tactile cues can also produce cross-modal covert orienting that affects audition and vision.Our senses are constantly bombarded by information arriving at the various sensory epithelia. Mechanisms of attention allow us to process selectively just those stimuli that may be ofparticular interest to us. Numerous studies have shown that people can focus their visual attention covertly (i.e., without head or eye movements, etc.) on a particular location, and so enhance the processing ofstimuli occurring there (see Posner, 1978, for a classic description of such findings; see also Klein, Kingstone, &Pontefract, 1992, andLaBerge, 1995, for more recent reviews). Although the majority of such studies of spatial attention have focused on unimodal selection, within just visual scenes, there has been a resurgence ofinterest recently in the possible effects of covert spatial orienting within the other sensory modalities-particularly, audition (e.g.,
It is known that small and large numbers facilitate left/right respectively (the SNARC effect). Recently, it has been proposed that numerical magnitude is just one example of a range of quantities, which have a common cognitive/neural representation. To investigate this proposition, response congruency effects were explored for stimuli which differed according to their: (a) numerical size, (b) physical size, (c) luminance, (d) conceptual size and (e) auditory intensity. In a series of experiments, groups of undergraduate participants made two-alternative forced choice discriminations with their left or right hands. There were clear interactions between magnitude and responding hand whereby right hand responses were faster for stimuli with (a) large numbers, (b) large physical size, (c) low luminance, and (d) a reference to large objects. There was no congruency effect for the auditory stimuli. The data demonstrate that the response congruency effect observed for numbers also occurs for a variety of other non-numerical visual quantities. These results support models of general magnitude representation and suggest that the association between magnitude and the left/right sides of space may not be related to culture and/or directional reading habits.
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