Facilitating masked visual target identification with auditory oddball stimuli

We conducted an additional experiment in order to compare participants’ performance in the presence of the attenuated oddball tone (MMQM) with that seen when a regular sequence of tones (MMMM) was presented. By reducing the number of experimental conditions tested, as in Experiments 1 and 2, we were able to increase the statistical power of any potential oddball cuing effect that might have been present. Twenty participants (14 female; age range = 18–32 years; mean age = 21 years) took part in this follow-up study. The IE scores from the two tone sequences (MMMM vs. MMQM) were subjected to a repeated measures ANOVA with tone sequence and target location as the within-participants variables. The analysis revealed no significant main effects and no significant interaction between target location and tone sequence. In particular, the presentation of a quieter tone with the target display did not facilitate participants’ visual target identification performance. In fact, if anything, participants’ overall performance was actually numerically worse when the visual displays were accompanied by the oddball MMQM (M = 7,073 ms) sequence than when accompanied by the MMMM display (M = 6,549 ms). Thus, not only did the quieter tone fail to enhance participants’ identification of the visual target, but, surprisingly, it actually resulted in performance that was even worse than when the regular sequence of tones were synchronized with the visual displays.

It is important to note that the term ‘attentional capture’ is used in the present study to refer to the capture of participants’ attention by an oddball stimulus. By contrast, Vroomen and de Gelder (2000) use the term to refer to the attentional capture resulting from an alerting/warning pre-cue that signals the onset of a target display (see Spence and Ngo 2012 for a recent review).