Pip and pop: nonspatial auditory signals improve spatial visual search.

By Erik Van der Burg, Christian N. L. Olivers, A. Bronkhorst, Jan Theeuwes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 2008

484 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Searching for an object within a cluttered, continuously changing environment can be a very time-consuming process. The authors show that a simple auditory pip drastically decreases search times for a synchronized visual object that is normally very difficult to find. This effect occurs even though the pip contains no information on the location or identity of the visual object. The experiments also show that the effect is not due to general alerting (because it does not occur with visual cues), nor is it due to top-down cuing of the visual change (because it still occurs when the pip is synchronized with distractors on the majority of trials). Instead, we propose that the temporal information of the auditory signal is integrated with the visual signal, generating a relatively salient emergent feature that automatically draws attention. Phenomenally, the synchronous pip makes the visual object pop out from its complex environment, providing a direct demonstration of spatially nonspecific sounds affecting competition in spatial visual processing.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4f9b234bda1b0d9478434a64b7e26a4478118ae6

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Citations in the corpus

The Curious Incident of Attention in Multisensory Integration: Bottom-up vs. Top-down (2016, unknown): “Interestingly, temporally and spatially aligned sensory inputs in different modalities have a higher likelihood to be favoured for further processing, and thus to capture an individual’s attention, than do stimuli that are not aligned (Driver, 1996; Stein et al., 2005; Van der Burg et al., 2008).”
Does crossmodal correspondence modulate the facilitatory effect of auditory cues on visual search? (2012, methodology): “First, this study represents an independent replication of the pip-and-pop effect, originally reported by Van der Burg et al. (2008).”
Rapid Recalibration to Audiovisual Asynchrony (2013, background): “Combining sensory information across the senses can markedly improve the precision and speed of perception (Morein-Zamir et al., 2003; Van der Burg et al., 2008b; Alais et al., 2010), although these benefits decline if the signals are asynchronous (Van der Burg et al., 2008b, 2010).”
The effect of synesthetic associations between the visual and auditory modalities on the Colavita effect (2015, background): “The pip-and-pop effect refers to the phenomenon that the detection of a visual target among visual distractors is speeded up by a spatially uninformative auditory cue (Van der Burg et al. 2008).”
Single-trial multisensory memories affect later auditory and visual object discrimination. (2015, unknown): “Thus, while von Kriegstein and Giraud (2006) presented unique auditory–visual pairs, we presented pairs that are linked at a more general semantic level of object association.”