The law of prior entry was one of E.B. Titchener’s seven fundamental laws of attention. According to Titchener : “the object of attention comes to consciousness more quickly than the objects which we are not attending to.” Although researchers have been studying prior entry for more than a century now, progress in understanding the effect has been hindered by the many methodological confounds present in early research. As a consequence, it is unclear whether the behavioral effects reported in the majority (...) of published studies in this area should be attributed to attention, decisional response biases, and/or, in the case of exogenous spatial cuing studies of the prior-entry effect, to sensory facilitation effects instead. In this article, the literature on the prior-entry effect is reviewed, the confounds present in previous research highlighted, current consensus summarized, and some of the key questions for future research outlined. In particular, recent research has now provided compelling psychophysical and electrophysiological evidence to support the claim that attending to a sensory modality, spatial location, or stimulus feature/attribute can all give rise to a relative speeding-up of the time of arrival of attended, as compared to relatively less attended stimuli. Prior-entry effects have now been demonstrated following both the endogenous and exogenous orienting of attention, though prior-entry effects tend to be smaller in magnitude when assessed by means of participants’ performance on SJ tasks than when assessed by means of their performance on TOJ tasks. (shrink)

In this review, psychophysical evidence concerning the existence of general principles of cross-modal perceptual organization and multisensory Gestalt grouping is critically evaluated. The focus is on cross-modal perceptual organization and multisensory Gestalten for the spatial senses of audition, vision, and touch. The review is structured around addressing four key questions that run through the literature in this area. The questions are: 1) Does the perceptual organization of stimuli in one sensory modality automatically influence the perceptual organization of stimuli presented in (...) another sensory modality? 2) Does intramodal perceptual grouping modulate the strength of cross-modal perceptual grouping? 3) Do intersensory Gestalten exist? And 4) Can cross-modal correspondences be conceptualized in terms of cross-modal grouping by similarity? (shrink)