Graduate Student, Experimental Psychology
St John's College
Thesis Title: Seeing the Light: An exploration of the Colavita visual dominance effect
Charles Spence
About
ABOUT ME
I am currently working at Accenture in London. You can download my thesis or any of my papers from this page. If you are interested in learning about the current research on the Colavita effect please get in touch with Jessica Hartcher-O'Brien or Charles Spence (Crossmodal Lab, University of Oxford).
MY RESEARCH
The Colavita effect provides a remarkable example of visual dominance, demonstrating that a visual stimulus can dominate our perception so much that, on occasion, it appears to extinguish a person’s perception of a concurrently-presented auditory stimulus. The aim of my research was to investigate some of the key factors contributing to the Colavita visual dominance effect in order to reach a deeper understanding of its causes. The hope being that the insights gained into the Colavita effect may also be applicable to the wider area of visual dominance.
DESCRIPTION OF THE COLAVITA EFFECT: EXTRACT FROM MY THESIS
"In Colavita’s (1974) original study, the participants were instructed to press a ‘tone key’ whenever they heard a tone and a ‘light key’ whenever they saw a light. However, unbeknownst to the participants, a small number of audiovisual bimodal trials (20% of the trials), in which both the light and tone were presented at the same time, were deliberately dispersed among the randomly alternating unimodal auditory and unimodal visual targets. In order to conceal the true nature of the experiment from his participants, Colavita originally deceived them into believing that the bimodal trials were ‘accidental’. Thus, the participants were presented with unimodal auditory, unimodal visual, and bimodal audiovisual stimuli and the point of interest was how they would respond on the bimodal trials. The surprising result to emerge from this experiment was that the participants pressed the ‘light key’ on 98% of the trials and reported being totally unaware of the tone on a third of those trials. This striking example of the pre-potency of a visual stimulus over an auditory stimulus is known as the Colavita visual dominance effect."
Contact Information
+44(0)7919 124 137
