Acoustic Interference on a Visual Attention Task in Relation to the Perceptual Load

Abstract

SOJ Psychology Open Access Research Article excluding them from perception. There are many evidences about the limited processing capacity for stimuli presented within the same sensory modality and a relevant question to study is whether similar limitations appear when the stimuli are presented across different modalities. This topic is also relevant to many recent studies on working memory and on the control of attention, including the ability to avoid distraction by irrelevant stimuli [9-13]. That is, a relevant open question is whether the attentional control is or not supramodal in nature [14-24]. The first aim of this paper was to contribute to the understanding of this important open question. Hence, we have carried out experiments using a visual attentional task in the absence and in the presence of irrelevant stimuli of a different modality (acoustic). A second aim of this work was to examine the question of whether irrelevant non-visual stimuli are or not ignored in terms of the visual perceptual load, which might also help to a better comprehension of the attentional control. Hence, we have also studied the influence of the visual load in the absence and presence of the acoustic stimuli. We have chosen the flanker task Eriksen and Eriksen [25], to carry out our attentional experiments. This task has often been used to measure the effect of irrelevant visual stimuli on the relevant task and the influence of many experimental conditions on the subject's responses has been adequately characterized [26-28]. Changes in the perceptual visual load, the addition of other stimuli of the same modality, the addition of cues, etc., may be done in this task by an easy and well-known way. Moreover, the effects of all these manipulations using exclusively visual stimuli have been already studied in depth and they may aid to elucidate the effects produced by the addition of non-visual stimuli to the visual task. In the classical flanker task, there is one central target surrounded by distractors and subjects are instructed to ignore the distractors (flankers) and to respond to the target. Many previous results have shown that when the display included incompatible distractors (those assigned to a response different from the response assigned to the target) the response times (RTs) were longer than when the distractors were compatible (those assigned to the same response as the target). The difference between the RTs in both