Prior Entry and the Colavita Effect

Camille Koppen, Experimental Psychology, Oxford University

Abstract
The Colavita effect describes the phenomenon whereby in a speeded discrimination task in which participants are presented with unimodal auditory, unimodal visual, or bimodal audiovisual stimuli, they often fail to respond to the auditory component of the bimodal targets. In the present study, we presented participants with unimodal auditory, unimodal visual, and bimodal stimuli, and varied the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the auditory and visual components of the bimodal targets. Participants responded to the auditory, visual and bimodal targets by pressing an auditory response key, a visual response key, or both keys. On bimodal trials, participants failed to respond to the sound significantly more often than they failed to respond to the light, thus demonstrating the prototypical Colavita effect. Importantly, the magnitude of the Colavita effect was found to decrease when the visual stimulus was presented after the sound. The magnitude of the Colavita effect at each SOA was also found to correlate significantly (r = +0.825) with the likelihood that participants would judge the visual stimulus as coming before the auditory stimulus when they performed an unspeeded temporal order judgment task in a separate block, thus supporting a prior entry interpretation of the Colavita effect.

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