The absence of an auditory-visual attentional blink using pure tones
Poster Presentation

Erik van der Burg
Cognitive Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Christian Olivers
Cognitive Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Adelbert Bronkhorst
Cognitive Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands and TNO Human Factors, Soesterberg, The Netherlands

Thomas Koelewijn
Cognitive Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Jan Theeuwes
Cognitive Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands

     Abstract ID Number: 200
     Full text: Not available
     Last modified: March 21, 2006
     Presentation date: 06/19/2006 4:00 PM in Hamilton Building, Foyer
     (View Schedule)

Abstract
An auditory-visual attentional blink (AB) paradigm is often used to explore the temporal dynamics of processing two targets from different modalities. Typically, visual target (T2) performance is impaired after the processing of an auditory target (T1). However, in the current study we show that processing a pure tone among different filler tones did not impair detection of a visual target letter among distractor letters. One explanation for the absence of a cross-modal AB is that participants postponed auditory processing. However, T2 performance remained unaffected when we forced subjects to immediately process T1 (the target tone),. Another explanation is that an AB pattern is only present when the auditory distractors (e.g., letters) are from the same alphanumeric class as the visual T2 (e.g., letter). We explored this notion by replacing the pure filler tones with spoken auditory letters. Again a pure target tone among spoken letters did not impair a visual target letter among distractor letters. Therefore, we suggest that an auditory-visual AB can only be observed when both T1 and T2 are semantically related .