Divided attention between simultaneous auditory and visual signals

• Published in: Perception & psychophysics Vol. 60; no. 2; pp. 179 - 190
• Main Authors: BONNEL, A.-M, HAFTER, E. R
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Austin, TX Psychonomic Society 01.02.1998
• Subjects: Adult; Attention - physiology; Audition; Auditory Perception - physiology; Biological and medical sciences; Contrast Sensitivity; Discrimination Learning; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Hearing; Humans; Loudness Perception; Perception; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Psychophysics; Psychophysiology; Vision; Visual perception; Visual Perception - physiology; Human; Cognition; Experimental study; Psychophysics; Hearing; Visual stimulus; Acoustic stimulus; Divided attention; Vision; Information processing; Concurrent task; Perception; Stimulus identification; Signal detection
• ISSN: 0031-5117; 1532-5962
• DOI: 10.3758/BF03206027

Past studies of simultaneous attention to pairs of visual stimuli have used the "dual-task" paradigm to show that identification of the direction of a change in luminance, whether incremental or decremental, is "capacity-limited," while simple detection of these changes is governed by "capacity-free" processes. On the basis of that finding, it has been suggested that the contrast between identification and detection reflects different processes in the sensory periphery, namely the responses of magno- and parvocellular receptors. The present study questions that assertion and investigates the contribution of central processing in resource limitation by applying the dual task to a situation in which one stimulus is auditory and one is visual. The results are much the same as before, with identification demonstrating the tradeoff in performance generally attributed to a limited capacity but detection showing no loss compared with single-task controls. This implies that limitations on resources operate at a central level of processing rather than in the auditory and visual peripheries.