Multisensory research within experimental psychology has led to the emergence of a number of lawful relations between response speed and various empirical conditions of the experimental setup (spatiotemporal stimulus configuration, intensity, number of modalities involved, type of instruction, and so forth). This chapter presents a conceptual framework to account for the effects of cross-modal stimulation on response speed. Although our framework applies to measures of cross-modal response speed in general, here we focus on modeling saccadic reaction time as a measure of orientation performance toward cross-modal stimuli.
The central postulate is the existence of a critical “time-window-of-integration” (TWIN) controlling the combination of information from different modalities. It is demonstrated that a few basic assumptions about this timing mechanism imply a remarkable number of empirically testable predictions. After introducing a general version of the TWIN model framework, we present various specifications and extensions of the original model that are geared toward more specific experimental paradigms. Our emphasis will be on predictions and empirical testability of these model versions, but for experimental data, we refer the reader to the original literature.
Copyright © 2012 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.