Abstract
In our previous study (Lee et al., VSS2015), we showed that visual dominance over auditory in spatial cuing persisted even when the cue became completely uninformative. In this study, we examined whether the visual dominance would still exist when both visual and auditory cues held only partial information but still informative to some extent. 20 participants reported the target shape (L or T), which appeared randomly either left or right side of the screen. The visual (an arrow), auditory (monaural sound), or audiovisual (an arrow and monaural sound) cues indicated the target location at given reliability levels, which decreased from 100% to 70% (5% step) in 5 sessions. Response times were longer with invalid cues. This cost in RT due to the invalid cues was inversely proportional to the reliability level and the invalid auditory cue was less likely to hinder the performance than the invalid visual or the audiovisual cues. These results confirmed that the participants tended to rely less on the auditory cues than the visual cues. However, when the cue reliability dropped to 70%, this visual dominance vanished. That is, the costs were not different between the visual and auditory cue conditions. Instead, the cost was significantly larger in the audiovisual cue condition, which shows that the participants used not only the visual cues but also the auditory cues. This result suggests that people mainly use the dominant sensory (visual) cue but switch their cue utilization strategy from unimodal to multimodal when information acquired from one sensory domain becomes unreliable.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2016