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Seeing the light: exploring the Colavita visual dominance effect

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Abstract

The Colavita visual dominance effect refers to the phenomenon whereby participants presented with unimodal auditory, unimodal visual, or bimodal audiovisual stimuli in a speeded discrimination task, fail to respond to the auditory component of bimodal targets significantly more often than they fail to respond to the visual component. The Colavita effect was demonstrated in this study when participants were presented with unimodal auditory, unimodal visual, or bimodal stimuli (in the ratios 40:40:20, Experiment 1; or 33:33:33, Experiment 2), to which they had to respond by pressing an auditory response key, a visual response key, or both response keys. The Colavita effect was also demonstrated when participants had to respond to the bimodal targets using a dedicated third (bimodal) response key (Experiment 3). These results therefore suggest that stimulus probability and the response demands of the task do not contribute significantly to the Colavita effect. In Experiment 4, we investigated what role exogenous attention toward a sensory modality plays in the Colavita effect. A significantly larger Colavita effect was observed when a visual cue preceded the bimodal target than when an auditory cue preceded it. This result suggests that the Colavita visual dominance effect can be partially explained in terms of the greater exogenous attention-capturing qualities of visual versus auditory stimuli.

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Notes

  1. Colavita and his colleagues (Colavita 1974; Colavita et al. 1976; Colavita and Weisberg 1979) defined the ‘prepotency of the visual over the auditory stimulus’ in terms of the fact that participants made more light-key than tone-key responses on the bimodal trials. In contrast, Egeth and Sager (1977) defined visual dominance in terms of the slowing of reaction times (RTs) to an auditory stimulus which they attributed to the presence of a concurrent visual stimulus. Subsequent research has, however, most frequently reverted to Colavita’s original definition (e.g., Koppen and Spence in press, submitted a, b; Sinnett et al. in press).

  2. It should be noted that the task that participants had to perform could also be considered to be a modality detection task. Quite what is the most appropriate description for the task is ambiguous, as participants were both detecting stimuli in different modalities, and discriminating which modality a target had been presented in.

  3. It is interesting to note that participants in our experiments responded more rapidly to unimodal than to bimodal targets, which is the reverse pattern of response latencies observed in redundant target paradigms (Miller 1982). The main difference between the Colavita effect and redundant target paradigm lies in the response requirements of the tasks: in the former, participants make modality discriminations, whereas in the latter they tend to make simple detection responses instead.

  4. We re-ran the analysis on the arcsine-transformed error data to ensure normality and homogeneity of variance. This analysis produced the same results. There was a significant main effect of Target Stimulus (Auditory, Bimodal, or Visual) [F(1.09, 14.20) = 21.16, P < 0.001], due to participants responding less accurately on bimodal target trials (P = 0.39; where P is the arcsine-transformed proportion) than on either unimodal auditory (P = 0.19; t(13) = 5.60, P < 0.001) or unimodal visual target trials (P = 0.19; t(13) = 4.14, P = 0.001), but no less accurately on unimodal visual than on unimodal auditory target trials (t(13) = 0.67, P = 0.515).

  5. Note that we did not attempt to match the intensity of the auditory and visual stimuli in the present study (cf. Spence et al. 2001b), which means that the visual stimuli used in our studies might have been subjectively less intense or alerting than the auditory stimuli. However, in this regard it should be noted that Colavita (1974, Experiment 2) attempted to make the auditory stimuli twice as intense as the visual stimulus, but found that the magnitude of the Colavita effect was unaffected by the experimental manipulation of relative subjective target intensity.

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Acknowledgments

C. K. was supported by a Departmental Studentship from the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford.

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  1. Crossmodal Research Laboratory, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3UD, UK

    Camille Koppen & Charles Spence

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  1. Camille Koppen
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  2. Charles Spence
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Correspondence to Camille Koppen.

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Koppen, C., Spence, C. Seeing the light: exploring the Colavita visual dominance effect. Exp Brain Res 180, 737–754 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-007-0894-3

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