https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/candy.rowe/Rowe99.pdf

Receiver psychology and the evolution of multicomponent signals.

Early selective-attention effects on the evoked potential: a critical review and reinterpretation.

Intersensory facilitation of reaction time: energy summation or preparation enhancement?

In a simple reaction time (RT) task, normal observers responded faster to simultaneous visual and tactile stimuli than to single visual or tactile stimuli. RT to simultaneous visual and tactile stimuli was also faster than RT to simultaneous dual visual or tactile stimuli. The advantage for RT to combined visual-tactile stimuli over RT to the other types of stimulation could be accounted for by intersensory neural facilitation rather than by probability summation. The direction of gaze (and presumably of visual attention) to space regions near to or far from the site of tactile stimulation had no effect on tactile RT. However, RT to single or dual tactile stimuli was fastest when observers could see the sites of tactile stimulation on their hands both directly and through a mirror at the same time. All these effects can be ascribed to the convergence of tactile and visual inputs onto neural centers which contain flexible multimodal representations of body parts.

/pdf/redundant-target-effect-and-intersensory-facilitation-from-1rc8aglxqc.pdf

Redundant target effect and intersensory facilitation from visual-tactile interactions in simple reaction time.

The Ratcliff diffusion model for simple two-choice decisions (e.g., Ratcliff, 1978; Ratcliff & McKoon, 2008) has two outstanding advantages. First, the model generally provides an excellent fit to the observed data (i.e., response accuracy and the shape of RT distributions, both for correct and error responses). Second, the parameters of the model can be mapped on to latent psychological processes such as the speed of information accumulation, response caution, and a priori bias. In recent years, the advantages of the Ratcliff diffusion model have become increasingly clear. Current advances in methodology allow all researchers to fit the diffusion model to data easily. Recent applications to ageing, lexical decision, IQ, practice, the implicit association test, and the accessory stimulus effect serve to highlight the added value of a diffusion model perspective on simple decision making.

Methodological and empirical developments for the Ratcliff diffusion model of response times and accuracy

Energy integration in intersensory facilitation.

Four trained Ss participated in a task concerned with intersensory facilitation of reaction time (RT). Discriminative RT to a visual event was longer than discriminative RT to a combined auditory-visual event, even though the auditory event by itself was a catch signal. The magnitude of this difference was greater with a long (5.5 sec) as opposed to short (.5 sec) foreperiod delay. This finding supported the hypothesis that the auditory component of the combined event serves a preparatory state role by enhancing response readiness, a role that is manifest to the extent that S’s prior degree of preparation is nonoptimal.

/pdf/preparatory-state-effects-in-intersensory-facilitation-3wnir4jg08.pdf

Preparatory state effects in intersensory facilitation

Sixty-three turtles, representing 50 species, were tested for the righting reflex under two conditions, inversion and suspension. Ninety-two percent performed the righting reflex under inversion; 67% performed the righting reflex under suspension. Differences in the performance of the righting reflex were noted and discussed in terms of natural selection and the evolutionary relationships between the species sampled.

/pdf/the-righting-reflex-in-turtles-a-description-and-comparison-4epu4nlpzw.pdf

Victor M. Ashe

Papers

Energy integration in intersensory facilitation.

Preparatory state effects in intersensory facilitation

The righting reflex in turtles: A description and comparison*