Multisensory Response Enhancement of Semantically Congruent and Incongruent Audio-Visual Stimuli

Abstract

This research explores whether multimodal semantic congruency facilitates larger multisensory response enhancement (MRE) compared to MRE facilitated by the principle of congruent effectiveness. Semantically matched audio-visual stimuli pairs with dissimilar response times in their unisensory condition, and semantically non-matched stimuli pairs with similar response times in their unisensory condition, were used. The results are in accordance with the principle of congruent effectiveness; unisensory conditions with similar RT’s elicit larger MRE in their respective multimodal condition. No significant differences in MRE were found between matched and non-matched conditions. However, this does not necessarily imply multimodal semantic congruency does not influence MRE. Due to the fact the manipulation in the experiment was unsuccessful, the current results cannot distinguish between the effects of multimodal semantic congruency- and the principle of congruent effectiveness on MRE.