How does processing style affect multisensory cognition?

Abstract

The paper aims to provide an strong evidence that the cognitive style: whether to be a holistic thinker or an analytic thinker, are affected to the strategy to bind information delivered by multisensory stimulus. In other word, through comparing the context sensitivity to congruity of the multisensory stimulus between holistic thinker and analytic thinker, two different process to perceive multisensory information are suggested. A photo of an animal and a crying sound of an animal, either congruent or incongruent to photo, were presented simultaneously to the participants. At the later stage, participants conducted the recognition task for identifying the previously seen animal. The accuracy of memory and reaction time to judge were measured as dependent variable. When the audiovisual cue was incongruent, holistic thinkers’ accuracy rate was much more reduced compared to that of analytic thinkers. Since holistic thinker tends to combine the cue from each sense modality and perceive as whole picture with more ease. Consequently, the incongruity of information is highly affect to the recognition to Easterners. However, analytic thinker has less tendency to perceive the information into one, instead they perceive it as a part. As a result, their the context sensitivity is less than holistic thinker. These findings tell the multisensory integration of information is affected by perceivers’ cultural background.