Auditory but not visual alerting cues provide response facilitation in simple visual target detection
Poster Presentation

Magali Jaffard
LPMC, MSHS, 99 avenue du Recteur Pineau, 86000 Poitiers, France

Abdelrhani Benraïss
LPMC, MSHS, 99 avenue du Recteur Pineau, 86000 Poitiers, France

Philippe Boulinguez
LPMC, MSHS, 99 avenue du Recteur Pineau, 86000 Poitiers, France

     Abstract ID Number: 160
     Full text: Not available
     Last modified: April 18, 2005

Abstract
Alerting mechanisms elicited by non-spatially informative cues are supposed to reduce reaction time (RT) in visual target detection tasks. It is generally reported that this automatic effect is attributed to a brief surge in arousal, and that auditory cues have a stronger effect than visual cues. In most studies, the method is based on the comparison of cued vs. non cued trials randomly presented in a unique bloc (mixed condition, e.g., Fan et al., 2005). In this study, we also tested the cueing effect when cued and non cued trials are presented in separate blocs. Several experiments adapted from a classical Posner like paradigm were performed. Reduced RT for cued compared with non cued trials were evidenced in the mixed condition, as previous studies already did. Conversely, an increase in RT for cued compared with non cued trials was found in separate blocs for short SOA (100 to 300ms). In other words, costs rather than benefits of peripheral visual alerting were observed. In fact, this difference was only due to the lengthening of non cued RT in the mixed condition with respect to non cued RT in the separate bloc condition (+80ms). Thanks to complementary Go/NoGo experiments, this effect was found to depend on inhibitory mechanisms elicited by cue presentation in the mixed condition. These experiments were reproduced with central visual alerting cues and similar patterns of results were found. Conversely, when using auditory alerting cues, alerting benefits are found for 300 to 900ms SOA. We suggest alerting effects (mechanisms?) could be specifically cross-modal whereas intra-modal cueing produces only interference at short cue-target delays.