Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Visual dominance refers to the tendency for visual stimuli to dominate awareness of stimuli of similar or lesser intensity presented simultaneously in other modalities. The effect may be seen in simple and choice reaction time studies. When visual and auditory stimuli are presented separately, visual reaction time is typically slower than auditory reaction time. However, when visual and auditory stimuli are presented simultaneously the visual stimulus generally provokes the first response. In this paper we provide a computational account of such visual dominance effects. The simulation extends an existing computational model of routine action selection, accounting for the counterintuitive visual dominance findings whilst providing further support for the original action selection model.