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Cross-Modal Auditory Habituation in Visual Affective Contexts

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 5:00 – 7:00 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Hafsa B. Siddiqui¹ (), James H. Kryklywy¹; ¹Lakehead University

Habituation is the process through which individuals filter out irrelevant stimuli in their environment. Although previous literature has established that the sensory and affective components of our environment can independently influence rates of habituation to irrelevant stimuli, it is less clear how affective contextual information influences habituation across sensory modalities. The goal of these experiments was to understand how affective visual features (i.e., valence [positive, negative, neutral] and arousal [low, high, neutral]) influence habituation to auditory information. Three experiments were conducted, each leveraging variations of an auditory oddball task. All auditory sequences consisted of standard tones (80%) interspersed with either higher or lower pitched deviant tones (each 10%). Experiment 1 manipulated valence (positive, negative, neutral) while matching arousal of visual features. Experiments 2 & 3 varied the arousal level (high, low) of positive and negative images respectively, with neutral and low arousal control conditions present in each. All images were chosen from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). In each condition, baseline auditory sensitivity while being presented with scrambled images was measured before and after each emotional image block. For each experiment, sensitivity measures (d’, c’) were computed per participant, followed by a 2 (pre/post auditory sensitivity) x 3 (visual affect) repeated-measures ANOVA. Results suggest that the valence and arousal of visual information differentially influence auditory habituation. This work highlights the boundaries of cross modal interaction by demonstrating how visual affective contextual information can modulate basic auditory processes.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions