The current study examined how simple tones affect speeded visuomotor responses in a visual-spatial sequence learning task. Across the three reported experiments, participants were presented with a visual target that appeared in different locations on a touchscreen monitor and they were instructed to touch the visual targets as quickly as possible. Visual sequences were either paired with sounds that correlated with the location of the target, paired with sounds that did not correlate with the location of the target, or the sequences were presented in silence (baseline). Response times decreased across training and participants were slower to respond to the visual stimuli when the sequences were paired with tones. Moreover, these interference effects were more pronounced early in training and explicit instructions directing attention to the visual modality had little effect on eliminating auditory interference, suggesting that these interference effects may stem from bottom-up factors and do not appear to be under attentional control. These findings have implications on tasks that require the processing of simultaneously presented auditory and visual information and provide support for a proposed mechanism underlying auditory dominance on a task that is typically better suited for the visual modality.

当前的研究检查了简单的音调如何在视觉空间序列学习任务中影响快速的视觉运动反应。在三个已报告的实验中，向参与者展示了一个视觉目标，该目标出现在触摸屏监视器上的不同位置，并被指示他们尽快触摸视觉目标。视觉序列要么与与目标位置相关的声音配对，要么与与目标位置不相关的声音配对，或者序列沉默（基线）。在整个训练过程中，响应时间减少，并且当序列与音调配对时，参与者对视觉刺激的响应变慢。而且，这些干扰作用在训练初期更加明显，将注意力转移到视觉方式的明确指示对消除听觉干扰影响很小，这表明这些干扰作用可能源于自下而上的因素，似乎没有受到注意控制。这些发现对需要处理同时呈现的听觉和视觉信息的任务产生了影响，并为基于听觉支配性的拟议机制提供了支持，该机制通常更适合于视觉模式。