Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The current study used an eye tracker to examine how auditoryinput affects the latency of visual fixations and speeded responseson a Serial Response Time Task (SRTT). In Experiment 1,participants viewed a sequence of visual stimuli that appeared indifferent locations on a computer monitor and the same sequencerepeated throughout the experiment. The visual sequence waseither presented in silence or paired with uncorrelated sounds(i.e., sounds did not predict visual target location). Participantsmade more fixations and were more likely to fixate on the visualstimuli when visual sequences were presented in silence thanwhen paired with sounds. Participants in Experiment 2 werepresented with the same sequences, but they also had to determineif each visual stimulus was red or blue. The presence of auditorystimuli had no effect on accuracy (red vs. blue), however, therewas some evidence that auditory stimuli delayed the latency offirst fixations to the visual stimuli and discriminating the imagesas red or blue was also slower relative to the unimodal visualbaseline. While visual stimuli often dominate auditory processingon spatial tasks, the current findings show that auditory stimulican also slow down visual detection on a task that is better suitedfor the visual modality. These findings are consistent with apotential mechanism underlying auditory dominance effects,which posits that auditory stimuli may attenuate and/or delay theencoding of visual information.