Abstract
Past studies of simultaneous attention to pairs of visual stimuli have used the “dual-task” paradigm to show that identification of the direction of a change in luminance, whether incremental or decremental, is “capacity-limited,” while simple detection of these changes is governed by “capacity-free” processes. On the basis of that finding, it has been suggested that the contrast between identification and detection reflects different processes in the sensory periphery, namely the responses of magno- and parvocellular receptors. The present study questions that assertion and investigates the contribution of central processing in resource limitation by applying the dual task to a situation in which one stimulus is auditory and one is visual. The results are much the same as before, with identification demonstrating the tradeoff in performance generally attributed to a limited capacity but detection showing no loss compared with single-task controls. This implies that limitations on resources operate at a central level of processing rather than in the auditory and visual peripheries.
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This work was supported in part by a research grant (5 RO1 DC00087) from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.
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Bonnel, AM., Haftser, E.R. Divided attention between simultaneous auditory and visual signals. Perception & Psychophysics 60, 179–190 (1998). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03206027
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03206027