Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.