Cross-modal enhancement of perceived brightness: Sensory interaction versus response bias

Abstract

and Price (1996) reported the presence of cross-modal enhancement of perceived visual intensity: Participants tended to rate weak lights as brighter when accompanied by a concurrent pulse of white noise than when presented alone. In the present study, two methods were used to determine whether the enhancement reflectsan early-stagesensory process or a later-stagedecisional process, such as a response bias. First, enhancement was eliminated when the noise accompanied the light on only 25% versus 50% of the trials. Second, enhancement was absent when tested with a paired-comparison method. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the sound-induced enhancement in judgments of brightness reflects a response bias, rather than an early sensory process-that is, enhancement is the result of a relatively late decisional process.

Evidence of stochastic resonance in an auditory discrimination task may reflect response bias

“…Contrary to these warnings, threshold and percentage correct measures still dominate experimental psychology, although, usually, as a consequence of convenience rather than conviction. The experiments performed here and by others (Odgaard et al, 2003;Wang et al, 1998) indicate that psychophysical procedures failing to control for response biases can potentially yield invalid data and lead to incorrect conclusions. Marks (1993Marks ( , 1996Marks ( , 1997 and collaborators (Aylor & Marks, 1976;Ben-Artzi & Marks, 1995;Odgaard et al, 2003;Rankin & Marks, 1991) and others (Kuze, 1995;Ward, 1979) have repeatedly warned of the interaction between decisional processes and stimulus context in sensory data, and the results reported here speak in support of the widespread adoption of criterion-controlled methods such as ROC analysis.…”

“…Odgaard, Arieh, and Marks (2003) argued that signal detection theory (SDT) can determine whether a genuine sensory enhancement is occurring or whether some other process is at work. The ability of SDT to control for response bias may help determine whether the results from Experiment 1 are attributable to an SR-like mechanism, and so Experiment 2 was conducted within the framework of SDT.…”

Auditory, tactile, and multisensory cues facilitate search for dynamic visual stimuli

“…Stein et al argued that this increase in perceived brightness was due to the crossmodal enhancement of the visual stimulus by the simultaneously presented auditory stimulus (one might think of it in terms of "superadditivity"; Stein & Meredith, 1993;Stein & Stanford, 2008). It is, however, important to note that, rather than visual stimulus enhancement, Odgaard, Arieh, and Marks (2003) subsequently argued that Stein et al's results might simply have reflected response bias, which is considered to occur as a later (i.e., postperceptual) decisional level of information processing.…”

Brighter noise: Sensory enhancement of perceived loudness by concurrent visual stimulation

“…Our present topic is the interaction between vision and audition in the perception of intensity. We report here data from two experiments done in conjunction with previous work (Odgaard, Arieh, & Marks, 2003), in which we seek to address the first two questions and then to set forth theoretical perspectives in order to explore the third.…”