Existence of competing modality dominances

Abstract

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.

Stimulus Onset Modulates Auditory and Visual Dominance

“…It is important to note that the reversal of dominance types demonstrated by Robinson et al [21] was the first reported example of auditory dominance in adults using this paradigm (see [20] for an example of auditory dominance in a modified n-back task). Given that it is not entirely clear what is driving some of the aforementioned findings, further examination of the stimulus factors influencing sensory dominance is critical to understanding this phenomenon.…”

“…Therefore, it may seem that auditory dominance simply does not occur in adults unless precise and extreme experimental conditions are met (but see [15][16][17][18][19] for sensory dominance shifts from auditory to visual dominance during development). However, there are limited situations in which audition has been shown to dominate vision [20][21][22][23]. In a study conducted by Robinson and colleagues [21], participants monitored a stream of bimodal audiovisual stimuli and were instructed to press a key in response to any deviations from a standard (i.e., respond to a unimodal auditory oddball (only the tone changed), a unimodal visual oddball (only the picture changed), or a bimodal oddball (both the tone and the picture changed)).…”

“…However, there are limited situations in which audition has been shown to dominate vision [20][21][22][23]. In a study conducted by Robinson and colleagues [21], participants monitored a stream of bimodal audiovisual stimuli and were instructed to press a key in response to any deviations from a standard (i.e., respond to a unimodal auditory oddball (only the tone changed), a unimodal visual oddball (only the picture changed), or a bimodal oddball (both the tone and the picture changed)). Participants completed this basic oddball detection task under three response conditions: in the 1-button task, participants were instructed to press a single response key if they detected an oddball of any type (Experiment 1); in the 3-button task, participants were instructed to press separate keys for each type of oddball (Experiment 2); and in the modified 1-button task, participants were instructed to press the same key in response to unimodal oddballs and to refrain from responding to bimodal oddballs (Experiment 3).…”

“…Interestingly, clear evidence of auditory dominance was demonstrated in both versions of the 1-button task, while visual dominance was observed in the 3-button task. To explain this pattern of results, Robinson et al [21] theorize that auditory and visual dominance may be driven by two separate underlying mechanisms that engage at different times when observing and responding to bimodal audiovisual stimuli. Specifically, they posit that the auditory mechanism occurs earlier in processing and can disrupt visual stimulus encoding.…”

“…Given that it is not entirely clear what is driving some of the aforementioned findings, further examination of the stimulus factors influencing sensory dominance is critical to understanding this phenomenon. The oddball paradigm employed by Robinson et al [21] is an ideal starting point for the examination of these factors because both auditory and visual dominance can be demonstrated with relatively small manipulations to experimental Vision 2020, 4, 14 3 of 16 protocols (i.e., by simply changing the response options; with auditory dominance being demonstrated in the 1-button version of the task and visual dominance in the 3-button version).…”