Auditory enhancement of visual searches for event scenes

Increasing research has revealed that uninformative spatial sounds facilitate the early processing of visual stimuli. This study examined the crossmodal interactions of semantically congruent stimuli by assessing whether the presentation of event-related characteristic sounds facilitated or interfered with the visual search for corresponding event scenes in pictures. The search array consisted of four images: one target and three non-target pictures. Auditory stimuli were presented to participants in synchronization with picture onset using three types of sounds: a sound congruent with a target, a sound congruent with a distractor, or a control sound. The control sound varied across six experiments, alternating between a sound unrelated to the search stimuli, white noise, and no sound. Participants were required to swiftly localize a target position while ignoring the sound presentation. Visual localization resulted in rapid responses when a sound that was semantically related to the target was played. Furthermore, when a sound was semantically related to a distractor picture, the response times were longer. When the distractor-congruent sound was used, participants incorrectly localized the distractor position more often than at the chance level. These findings were replicated when the experiments ruled out the possibility that participants would learn picture-sound pairs during the visual tasks (i.e., the possibility of brief training during the experiments). Overall, event-related crossmodal interactions occur based on semantic representations, and audiovisual associations may develop as a result of long-term experiences rather than brief training in a laboratory.