Preschool children and adults flexibly shift their preferences for auditory versus visual modalities but do not exhibit auditory dominance

摘要

The goal of the present study is to evaluate the claim that young children display preferences for auditory stimuli over visual stimuli. This study is motivated by concerns that the visual stimuli employed in prior studies were considerably more complex and less distinctive than the competing auditory stimuli, resulting in an illusory preference for auditory cues. Across three experiments, preschool children and adults were trained to use paired audio-visual cues to predict the location of a target. At test, the cues were switched so that auditory cues indicated one location and visual cues indicated the opposite location. In contrast to prior studies, preschool age children did not exhibit auditory dominance. Instead, children and adults flexibly shifted their preferences as a function of the degree of contrast within each modality (with high contrast leading to greater use).