Auditory Stimuli Automatically Grab Attention: Evidence From Eye Tracking and Attentional Manipulations

Simultaneously presenting auditory and visual stimuli can hinder performance for one modality while the other dominates. For approximately 40 years, research with adults has primarily indicated visual dominance, while recent research with infants and young children has revealed auditory dominance. The current study further investigates modality dominance with adults, finding evidence for both auditory and visual dominance across 3 experiments. Using a simple discrimination task, Experiment 1 revealed that cross-modal presentation attenuated discrimination of auditory input, while at the same time, also slowed down visual processing. Even when participants were instructed to only pay attention to the visual stimuli, both spoken nonsense words and nonlinguistic sounds slowed down visual processing (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 used a similar discrimination task while utilizing an eye tracker to examine how auditory input affects visual fixations. Cross-modal presentation attenuated auditory discrimination; however, it also slowed down visual response times. In addition, adults also made longer fixations and were slower to make their first fixation when images were paired with sounds. The latter finding is novel and consistent with a proposed mechanism of auditory dominance: auditory stimuli automatically engage attention and attenuate or delay visual processing.