Authors
Christian NL Olivers, Edward Awh, Erik Van der Burg
Publication date
2016/12
Journal
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
Volume
42
Issue
12
Pages
2115
Publisher
American Psychological Association
Description
Visual attention serves to select salient and relevant events from the visual input. Selective attention to a visual event can be driven by a synchronous sound. Interestingly, recent evidence suggests that a sound can only drive selection of 1 concurrent visual event, suggesting that attentional capacity is much lower for audiovisual events than for purely visual events. Here we corroborate and extend this finding using a mixture modeling technique that distinguishes between the probability and precision of perception. Observers were presented with displays of multiple continuously flickering objects, of which either 1 or 2 were coupled to a single sound. In 2 experiments, we found that the probability of correctly reporting an object was almost halved when the number of synchronized visual objects increased from 1 to 2. Precision, however, was not affected. This indicates that rather than attention being distributed across …
Total citations
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Scholar articles
CNL Olivers, E Awh, E Van der Burg - … of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and …, 2016