colavita effect

8/9/2019 Colavita Effect

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Visual Dominance Effect

People are exposed with lots of different things at the same time in everyday living.

For instance, people can see and hear what other people are saying, and feel hot or cold at the

same time. The ability to integrate information from a number of senses provides us with an

accurate and rich perceptual experience of the world around us. The co occurrences of

information from different sensory modalities in the real world give rise to various types of

bimodal interaction. ultisensory perception is often influenced by what we see. The

phenomenon of visual dominance has been observed in laboratory settings and in the real

world. Visual dominance has been an interesting phenomenon to loo! at when studying

multisensory perception. "esearches had been done to explore the phenomenon of visual

dominance.

#n multimodal environments, vision often has an advantage over other senses in

human$ this phenomenon is called visual dominance effect. Vision can dominate over

audition in locali%ation &udgement, over touch for shape &udgement, and over proprioception

when trying to determine the position of one's limb in space ()artcher*+'rien et. al., -/0.

+ur perception of auditory stimuli is often influenced by visual stimuli. Visual dominance

effect has been demonstrated in a multisensory illusion, the c1ur! effect, where

incongruent visual information influences the perceived auditory information, resulting in a

change in the perceived sound from the real auditory input (argary et al., -20. #t is

probably due to the fact that in the real world, the visual system provides the most reliable

information about the identity of an ob&ect. #n addition, vision also shown to be dominant

modality in a number of other animal species as well, not confined to human. For example,

vision seems to dominate audition in cows and rats, which has been seen in food ac3uisition

procedures (4innet, 4pence 5 4oto*faraco, -60. Visual dominance has also been


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demonstrated in pigeons by training pigeons to perform auditory*visual discrimination tas!

("andich, 7lein 5 8o8+"D+, 926/0.

:olavita Effect

+ne of the most interesting demonstrations of visual dominance is represented by the

:olavita effect. The :olavita visual dominance effect refers to the phenomenon where

participants presented with unimodal auditory, unimodal visual or bimodal audiovisual

stimuli fail to respond to the auditory component of the stimulus more significantly more

often than they fail to respond to the visual component ()artcher*+'rien et. al., -/0. ;

research on human sensory dominance was conducted by Francis . :olavita(926


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visual stimuli were presented (7oppen 5 4pence, -60. #n more recent studies, the

magnitude of the :olavita effect seems to be much smaller than reported by :olavita (926


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simultaneously. Participants respond faster and more accurate to semantically congruent

auditory and visual stimuli than to semantically incongruent stimulus pairings, probably due

to the redundant target effect.

:olavita effect is affected by factors that contribute to the structural binding of

audiovisual stimuli, but not by those that emerge later in stimulus processing, such as the

semantic congruency (7oppen, ;lsius 5 4pence, -/0. oth spatial and temporal

coincidence between the auditory and visual stimuli can modulate :olavita effect. Ahen the

auditory and visual stimuli were presented closer together in time, the :olavita effect is larger

compared to when they were presented asynchronously. #n addition, larger :olavita effect has

been reported when the auditory and visual stimuli are presented from the same spatial

location rather than from different locations. 7oppen et. al. (-/0 used the =unity effect' to

explain the role of spatial and temporal coincidence between stimuli in modulating the

:olavita effect. ;ccording to the ?nity effect, intersensory bias is greater when observer

believed that two sensory events refer to the same unimodal ob&ect rather than to separate

events.

Bo :olavita effect in people with one eye

#t is well !nown that people with one eye have enhanced spatial vision implying intra*

model compensation for their loss of binocularity (oro 5 4teeves, -9-0. ; study was

conducted to investigate whether a cross*modal sensory compensation will occur following

loss of one eye, or monocular blindness. Bo :olavita effect was found in people with

monocular blindness, which means that they have an e3ual processing of visual and auditory

stimulus. People with one eye have an e3ual allocation of sensory resources. Degradation in

the reliability of the visual information leads to enhanced sound locali%ation in people with

one eye. #t is most li!ely due to the cortical remapping that allows the brain to modify itself


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after it has been compromised. +ther intact sensory systems may adapt and compensate for

the loss of the senses. For example, people who suffered from blindness have enhanced

ability in detecting auditory and tactile stimuli in the natural environment, which help them to

survive in the real world.

colavita effect

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