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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Feb 20, 2026

Investigating the Deployment of Visual Attention Before Accurate and Averaging Saccades via Eye Tracking and Assessment of Visual Sensitivity

Investigating the Deployment of Visual Attention Before Accurate and Averaging Saccades via Eye Tracking and Assessment of Visual Sensitivity

Published on: March 18, 2019

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

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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Related Experiment Videos

Last Updated: Feb 20, 2026

Investigating the Deployment of Visual Attention Before Accurate and Averaging Saccades via Eye Tracking and Assessment of Visual Sensitivity

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Published on: March 18, 2019

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Published on: January 23, 2017

Measurement of Neurophysiological Signals of Ignoring and Attending Processes in Attention Control

Measurement of Neurophysiological Signals of Ignoring and Attending Processes in Attention Control

Published on: July 5, 2015

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.