The effects of visual and auditory synchrony on human foraging

Can synchrony in stimulation guide attention and aid perceptual performance? Here, in a series of three experiments, we tested the influence of visual and auditory synchrony on attentional selection during a novel human foraging task. Human foraging tasks are a recent extension of the classic visual search paradigm in which multiple targets must be located on a given trial, making it possible to capture a wide range of performance metrics. Experiment 1 was performed online, where the task was to forage for 10 (out of 20) vertical lines among 60 randomly oriented distractor lines that changed color between yellow and blue at random intervals. The targets either changed colors in visual synchrony or not. In another condition, a non-spatial sound additionally occurred synchronously with the color change of the targets. Experiment 2 was run in the laboratory (within-subjects) with the same design. When the targets changed color in visual synchrony, foraging times were significantly shorter than when they randomly changed colors, but there was no additional benefit for the sound synchrony, in contrast to predictions from the so-called “pip-and-pop” effect (Van der Burg et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1053-1065, 2008). In Experiment 3, task difficulty was increased as participants foraged for as many 45° rotated lines as possible among lines of different orientations within 10 s, with the same synchrony conditions as in Experiments 1 and 2. Again, there was a large benefit of visual synchrony but no additional benefit for sound synchronization. Our results provide strong evidence that visual synchronization can guide attention during multiple target foraging. This likely reflects the local grouping of the synchronized targets. Importantly, there was no additional benefit for sound synchrony, even when the foraging task was quite difficult (Experiment 3).