The current study examined how relevant and irrelevantauditory stimuli affect the speed of responding to structuredvisual sequences. Participants were presented with a dot thatappeared in different locations on a touch screen monitor andthey were instructed to quickly touch the dot. Response timessped up over time, suggesting that participants learned thevisual sequences. Response times in Experiment 1 were slowerwhen the dot was paired with random sounds, suggesting thatirrelevant sounds slowed down visual processing/responding.Dots in Experiment 2 were paired with correlated sounds (bothauditory and visual information provided locationinformation). While the redundant intersensory informationdid not speed up response times, it did partially attenuateauditory interference. These findings have implications ontasks that require processing of simultaneously presentedauditory and visual information and provide evidence ofauditory interference and possibly dominance on a task thattypically favors the visual modality.

The current study examined cardiac and behavioral responsesto changing auditory and visual information while usingmodified oddball tasks. When instructed to press the samebutton for auditory and visual oddballs, auditory dominancewas found with cross-modal presentation slowing downvisual response times and decreasing visual accuracy. Wheninstructed to make separate responses to auditory and visualoddballs, visual dominance was found with cross-modalpresentation slowing down response times and decreasingauditory accuracy. However, examination of cardiacresponses that were time-locked to stimulus onset show cross-modal facilitation effects, with discrimination of oddballs andstandards occurring earlier in the course of processing in thecross-modal condition than in the unimodal conditions. Thesefindings shed light on potential mechanisms underlyingmodality dominance effects and have implications on tasksthat require simultaneous processing of auditory and visualinformation.