Crossmodal semantic congruence guides spontaneous orienting in real-life scenes.

In real-world scenes, the different objects and events are often interconnected within a rich web of semantic relationships. These semantic links help parse information efficiently and make sense of the sensory environment. It has been shown that, during goal-directed search, hearing the characteristic sound of an everyday life object helps finding the affiliate objects in artificial visual search arrays as well as in naturalistic, real-life videoclips. However, whether crossmodal semantic congruence also triggers orienting during spontaneous, not goal-directed observation is unknown. Here, we investigated this question addressing whether crossmodal semantic congruence can attract spontaneous, overt visual attention when viewing naturalistic, dynamic scenes. We used eye-tracking whilst participants (N = 45) watched video clips presented alongside sounds of varying semantic relatedness with objects present within the scene. We found that characteristic sounds increased the probability of looking at, the number of fixations to, and the total dwell time on semantically corresponding visual objects, in comparison to when the same scenes were presented with semantically neutral sounds or just with background noise only. Interestingly, hearing object sounds not met with an object in the scene led to increased visual exploration. These results suggest that crossmodal semantic information has an impact on spontaneous gaze on realistic scenes, and therefore on how information is sampled. Our findings extend beyond known effects of object-based crossmodal interactions with simple stimuli arrays and shed new light on the role that audio-visual semantic relationships out in the perception of everyday life scenarios.

Addressing the Association Between Action Video Game Playing Experience and Visual Search in Naturalistic Multisensory Scenes.

Prior studies investigating the effects of routine action video game play have demonstrated improvements in a variety of cognitive processes, including improvements in attentional tasks. However, there is little evidence indicating that the cognitive benefits of playing action video games generalize from simplified unisensory stimuli to multisensory scenes - a fundamental characteristic of natural, everyday life environments. The present study addressed if video game experience has an impact on crossmodal congruency effects when searching through such multisensory scenes. We compared the performance of action video game players (AVGPs) and non-video game players (NVGPs) on a visual search task for objects embedded in video clips of realistic scenes. We conducted two identical online experiments with gender-balanced samples, for a total of N = 130. Overall, the data replicated previous findings reporting search benefits when visual targets were accompanied by semantically congruent auditory events, compared to neutral or incongruent ones. However, according to the results, AVGPs did not consistently outperform NVGPs in the overall search task, nor did they use multisensory cues more efficiently than NVGPs. Exploratory analyses with self-reported gender as a variable revealed a potential difference in response strategy between experienced male and female AVGPs when dealing with crossmodal cues. These findings suggest that the generalization of the advantage of AVG experience to realistic, crossmodal situations should be made with caution and considering gender-related issues.

Characteristic Sounds Facilitate Object Search in Real-Life Scenes.

Real-world events do not only provide temporally and spatially correlated information across the senses, but also semantic correspondences about object identity. Prior research has shown that object sounds can enhance detection, identification, and search performance of semantically consistent visual targets. However, these effects are always demonstrated in simple and stereotyped displays that lack ecological validity. In order to address identity-based cross-modal relationships in real-world scenarios, we designed a visual search task using complex, dynamic scenes. Participants searched for objects in video clips recorded from real-life scenes. Auditory cues, embedded in the background sounds, could be target-consistent, distracter-consistent, neutral, or just absent. We found that, in these naturalistic scenes, characteristic sounds improve visual search for task-relevant objects but fail to increase the salience of irrelevant distracters. Our findings generalize previous results on object-based cross-modal interactions with simple stimuli and shed light upon how audio-visual semantically congruent relationships play out in real-life contexts.