Is a picture worth a thousand words? The flexible nature of modality dominance in young children.
When presented simultaneously with equally discriminable, but unfamiliar, visual and auditory stimuli, 4-year-olds exhibited auditory dominance, processing only auditory information (Sloutsky & Napolitano, 2003). The current study examined factors underlying auditory dominance. In 6 experiments, 4-year-olds (N=181) were presented with auditory and visual compounds in which (a) the complexity and familiarity of stimuli were systematically varied (Experiments 1-5) and (b) participants were explicitly instructed to attend to a particular modality (Experiment 6). Results indicate that auditory dominance is a special case of flexible modality dominance, which may stem from automatic pulls on attention. Theoretical implications of these results for understanding the development of attention and cross-modal processing, as well as linguistic and conceptual development, are discussed.
Napolitano
Amanda C
AC
Center for Cognitive Science, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
Sloutsky
Vladimir M
VM
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D001288:Attention; D002675:Child, Preschool; D002755:Choice Behavior; D003463:Cues; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D010988:Play and Playthings; D012201:Reward; D013067:Speech Perception