Poster #7 - Steady Visual Search Performance in 16-month-olds across Synchronous and Asynchronous Acoustic Stimulations

• In Event: Poster Session 14

Abstract

Background
Evidence suggests that rhythmic auditory stimulations, even non-meaningful ones, may lead to modulation of visual search tasks in adults (Ngo & Spence, 2010; Van der Burg, Cass, Olivers, Theeuwes, & Alais, 2010; Van der Burg, Olivers, Bronkhorst, & Theeuwes, 2008). It’s been shown that high tones embedded in a sequence with low tones show an effect on the modulation of attentional allocation and result in efficiency of performance (Bolger, Coull, & Schön, 2014; Bolger, Trost, & Schön, 2013; Vroomen & Gelder, 2000). Very young infants capture temporal synchrony between acoustic and/or visual stimulations to explore their world from the beginning of their life (Haith, Hazan, & Goodman, 1988; Messinger et al., 2017; Winkler, Háden, Ladinig, Sziller, & Honing, 2009). The Intersensory Redundancy Framework (Bahrick & Lickliter, 2000, 2012, 2014) suggests that young children gain benefits by using amodal properties in a cross-modal sensory event to guide perceptual and attentional learning. Yet, evidence of how auditory stimulations modulate visual search performance in young children is still unclear. This study aimed to evaluate whether reaction times (RTs) and accuracy of visual search performance could be influenced by rhythmic audio-visual stimulations.

Methods
This mixed study design included four visual search conditions. One group of participants (n = 29, 16 boys, M = 488 days, SD = 11.3 days) received synchronous conditions with and without a regular beat sequence. Two asynchronous conditions with and without a regular beat sequence were assigned to the other group (n = 30, 17 boys, M = 486 days, SD = 9.3 days). Each condition consisted of two blocks with 48 trails in total. Visual stimuli were the same in all conditions. The visual search task contained set sizes of 2, 3, 4, and 6. Auditory stimuli included tones of 880 and 440 Hz. The former was to define synchronous and asynchronous with the appearance of visual stimuli while the latter was used as an unstressed beat to present regular (4 Hz) or irregular stimuli. Each participant had two conditions during two different visits.

Results
The RT and accuracy data in mixed-effects models show significant main effects for set size (F = 5.76, p < .001). The main effect of set size reflects increasing RT and decreasing accuracy with a higher number of distractors. There is no effect regarding synchronicity or regularity of auditory stimulations even after taking interaction, trial order, or block order into account.

Conclusion and discussion
In sum, this study showed visual search performance was only affected by the number of distractors. The results did not support the benefits of synchronous or rhythmic auditory stimulations on visual search performance. One possible reason contributing to the results might be that search skills at this age are still not mature, and in turn, limit the modulation effect. Second, the auditory entraining beat sequence with the frequency of 4 Hz might be effective for adults based on previous literature but not for children at the age of 16 months.

Author

• Hsing-Fen Tu, Uppsala universitet
  Presenting Author