Abstract
Responses to multiple stimuli from different modalities tend to be faster compared to responses to each of these stimuli alone. Neurophysiological studies on higher mammals and behavioral studies on humans suggest that the relative amount of enhancement is inversely related to stimuli intensity. In two experiments the duration of visual and tactile stimuli was varied to investigate whether duration, as a further determinant of stimulus effectiveness, is also inversely related to the relative amount of response enhancement. Visual and tactile stimuli were presented left or right of fixation either in the same or different hemifields. Participants were required to gaze only at visual stimuli and to ignore tactile (focused attention paradigm). Saccadic reaction times were recorded. Results from both experiments show that the relative amount of response enhancement was largest for the shortest stimulus duration and decreases with increasing stimulus duration, i.e., inverse effectiveness of stimulus duration.
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Notes
Stimulus durations were determined in unimodal pilot studies such that: (a) RT decreased monotonically with increasing stimulus duration, (b) difference in RT was as large as possible between the shortest and longest durations, and (c) steps between the lower four durations were equal in size for each modality. The longest condition (500 ms) was added to allow comparisons to earlier experiments.
Participant SL performed saccades that systematically overshot beyond the position of the target. This resulted in a higher mean amplitude and a larger scatter.
This strongly suggests that participants responded according to the FAP, i.e., ignored the non-target. Otherwise, many more direction errors should have been observed on contralateral trials than on ipsilateral.
Participant IM performed saccades that systematically overshot beyond the position of the target. This resulted in a higher mean amplitude and a larger scatter.
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Acknowledgment
This research was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) Grant No. Di 506/7-2 to the second author.
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Rach, S., Diederich, A. Visual–tactile integration: does stimulus duration influence the relative amount of response enhancement?. Exp Brain Res 173, 514–520 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-006-0452-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-006-0452-4