Does Task-Irrelevant Brightness Modulation Affect Auditory Contrast Processing? Exploring the Interplay Between Temporal Synchrony and Stimulus Salience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Stimulus factors such as timing, spatial location, and stimulus effectiveness affect whether and how information across the senses is integrated. Extending recent work highlighting interactions between stimulus factors, here we investigated the influence of visual information on auditory processing, complementing previous studies on the influence of auditory information on visual processing. We hypothesized that task-irrelevant and spatially non-informative visual information would enhance auditory contrast processing, when visual information was at an optimal salience level and changed synchronously with the sound. We asked human observers to indicate the location of an amplitude-modulated white-noise sound, while its loudness against a constant white-noise background varied across trials. To test for the influence of task-irrelevant visual information, we modulated screen brightness smoothly (Experiment 1) or transiently (Experiment 2) in phase or out of phase with the amplitude modulation of the target sound. In addition, to test for the interaction between temporal synchrony and stimulus salience, maximum brightness varied systematically across trials. Auditory contrast thresholds were compared across conditions. Results showed that task-irrelevant visual information did not alter auditory contrast thresholds regardless of the nature of modulation of brightness, contrary to our expectations. Nonetheless, task-irrelevant visual information modulated in phase with the target sound reduced auditory contrast thresholds if we accounted for individual differences in the optimal salience required for the largest multisensory effects. Our results are discussed in light of several stimulus factors that might be critical in modulating multisensory enhancement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".