title: Reaction times in a bisensory task: implications for attention and speech perception.
abstract: Reading reaction time (RT) to visual stimuli was shown to vary according to the nature of simultaneous auditory stimuli. In Experiment 1, simultaneous different digits produced slower RTs than a burst of speech noise, while identicaly digits produced faster RTs. In Experiments 2 and 3 the stimuli were phoneme pairs which differed on either zero, one, or two articulatory features. Identical phonemes resulted in the fastest RTs. The RTs to non-identical phoneme pairs were not directly related to the number of differing features but were dependent upon the specific feature involved. A two-stage model was proposed to explain the results in which parallel processing of simultaneous input occurs prior to a decision-making stage.
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D001307:Auditory Perception; D003657:Decision Making; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D011930:Reaction Time; D013060:Speech; D014796:Visual Perception