Heteromodal Cueing and Auditory-Visual Interaction: A Literature Review

Summary

Experiments were reviewed which dealt with the effect of an auditory cue stimulus on sensitivity to a visual detection stimulus, and vice versa. In most cases the heteromodal cue was temporally varied around the time of occurrence of the detection stimulus.

Different results were reported when a prolonged cue was used (which overlapped the detection stimulus when the onsets of both were not simultaneous) than when a brief-duration cue was used: e.g., in the former case, but not in the latter, sensitivity to the detection stimulus was affected by the intensity of a clearly perceptible heteromodal cue. Es tended to explain the effects of prolonged cue in “neurophysiological-interaction” terms and of brief-duration cue in “attentional” terms. Delta t (difference between times of detection-stimulus and cue onset) was most likely to affect sensitivity to the detection stimulus when marker stimuli reliably informed S when to attend for the detection stimulus, but did not exactly define its time of possible occurrence. A consistent delta-t effect was that a light-cued sound stimulus was best detected when the flash preceded it by 0 to 500 msec.