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Task Irrelevant Sounds Influence Visual Attention Through Graded Crossmodal Semantic Modulation.

Home
Task Irrelevant Sounds Influence Visual Attention Through Graded Crossmodal Semantic Modulation.

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Task irrelevant sounds influence visual attention through graded crossmodal semantic modulation.

Kira Wegner-Clemens¹, George L Malcolm², Dwight J Kravitz³

¹Psychological and Brain Sciences, George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA. kira@gwu.edu.

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

|February 18, 2026

View abstract on PubMed

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Semantic knowledge guides attention across senses. Related sounds and images improve visual search speed, even when sounds are task-irrelevant, revealing a robust cross-modal attention mechanism.

Keywords:

Attention Audiovisual Multisensory Semantics

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Neuroscience
Multisensory Processing

Background:

Visual attention is guided by semantic information.
Less is known about how semantics shape attention in multisensory contexts.
Task-irrelevant sounds can facilitate visual search for matched targets.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate if semantic information influences attention in audiovisual contexts beyond direct matches.
To determine if sound-image semantic relatedness affects visual search speed.
To examine if this effect persists when semantic information is task-irrelevant.

Main Methods:

Participants searched for target images while semantic relatedness between sounds and images was systematically varied.
Two follow-up experiments used an orthogonal Gabor discrimination task to assess task relevance.

Behavioral search speed was the primary measure.

Main Results:

Visual search speed scaled with sound-image semantic relatedness; targets were found faster with more related sounds.
This semantic scaling effect persisted even when the sounds were task-irrelevant.
Semantic knowledge guides audiovisual attention robustly, irrespective of task relevance or direct matching.

Conclusions:

Semantic knowledge significantly guides audiovisual attention.
A robust cognitive mechanism processes semantics across sensory modalities to influence attentional allocation.
This mechanism operates even for task-irrelevant stimuli and beyond direct sensory matches.