The Effect of Simultaneously Presented Words and Auditory Tones on Visuomotor Performance

Abstract

The experiment reported here used a variation of the spatial cueing task to examine the effects of unimodal and bimodal attention-orienting primes on target identification latencies and eye gaze movements. The primes were a nonspatial auditory tone and words known to drive attention consistent with the dominant writing and reading direction, as well as introducing a semantic, temporal bias (past–future) on the horizontal dimension. As expected, past-related (visual) word primes gave rise to shorter response latencies on the left hemifield and future-related words on the right. This congruency effect was differentiated by an asymmetric performance on the right space following future words and driven by the left-to-right trajectory of scanning habits that facilitated search times and eye gaze movements to lateralized targets. Auditory tone prime alone acted as an alarm signal, boosting visual search and reducing response latencies. Bimodal priming, i.e., temporal visual words paired with the auditory tone, impaired performance by delaying visual attention and response times relative to the unimodal visual word condition. We conclude that bimodal primes were no more effective in capturing participants’ spatial attention than the unimodal auditory and visual primes. Their contribution to the literature on multisensory integration is discussed.

Two Cultural Processing Asymmetries Drive Spatial Attention

“…This is very different from a setup where, prior to target onset, the participants' gaze is mandatorily anchored at the center of the screen, and stimuli are presented bilaterally. In such a setup, visual attention is expected to progress from the starting point in line with the reading direction (i.e., right for LR readers and left for RL readers; Mendonça et al, 2020aMendonça et al, , 2021. In this case, attention would not regress to the habitual starting point of reading/writing.…”