Paper on crossmodal primed dichotic listening

This was the first paper in my PhD. Two experiments presented a single prime syllable (the first experiment presented it as sound, the second as text on screen), followed by a dichotic (one in each ear) syllable pair, and asked participants which syllable they heard from the dichotic pair. The results from both experiments showed that participants tended to report the syllable that had been repeated from the prime. In accounting for the results, we said that the selection between the dichotic syllables is a demanding task, and to facilitate the selection, participants inhibit the prime syllable. The inhibition of the syllable is retained at the time of the selection process, and creates a bias for the response. It's interesting that the priming was effective also when it was crossmodal (prime as text, dichotic syllables as sound), from which we can make assumptions about the cognitive level of the mechanism.

Sætrevik & Hugdahl (2007b) Priming inhibits the right ear advantage in dichotic listening - Implications for auditory laterality - Neuropsychologia

I initially intended this as a simple pilot study that should give a positive priming effect, and was quite surprised by the negative priming effect found. This required me to rethink the theoretical model, and consequently changed the form of my PhD project.

This first paper reported the results in terms of laterality of the response (whether the stimulus from the left or right ear was reported), as was common in our research community. I later abandoned this approach, as the priming effect appears to be symmetrical for both ears (although it acts on the background bias of the "right ear advantage"), and instead reported whether or not the repeated syllable was selected or not.

I have not since followed up on the crossmodality of the priming effect.