title: The capacity to detect synchronous audiovisual events is severely limited: Evidence from mixture modeling.
abstract: Visual attention serves to select salient and relevant events from the visual input. Selective attention to a visual event can be driven by a synchronous sound. Interestingly, recent evidence suggests that a sound can only drive selection of 1 concurrent visual event, suggesting that attentional capacity is much lower for audiovisual events than for purely visual events. Here we corroborate and extend this finding using a mixture modeling technique that distinguishes between the probability and precision of perception. Observers were presented with displays of multiple continuously flickering objects, of which either 1 or 2 were coupled to a single sound. In 2 experiments, we found that the probability of correctly reporting an object was almost halved when the number of synchronized visual objects increased from 1 to 2. Precision, however, was not affected. This indicates that rather than attention being distributed across multiple simultaneous audiovisual events, just 1 of them is singled out for attentional selection. This was not due to a capacity limit for selecting the visual objects per se; pure visual cues elicited a much higher probability of report and in that case there were clear declines in precision at larger set sizes, indicating the concurrent selection of multiple items. The results point toward a dissociation in capacity for visually and aurally cued prioritization of visual objects. (PsycINFO Database Record
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
authors.forename: Christian N L
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-7470-5378
authors.initials: CNL
authors.lastname: Olivers
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Chicago.
authors.forename: Edward
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Awh
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
authors.forename: Erik
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Van der Burg
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult