Use of tone offset to facilitate reaction time to light onset

Four Ss participated in a visual discriminative reaction time (RT) task to explore the phenomenon of intersensory facilitation. Previous research has indicated that RT to a joint visual-auditory event is more rapid than RT to the visual component alone, even when the auditory component is noninformative. In the present study, a tone offset was used in place of the usual affirmative event (click). The results indicated that RT was more rapid when the tone offset in conjunction with the occurrence of the visual event as compared to when the tone remained on throughout the trial. The effect was comparable in magnitude to that obtained in prior studies using an affirmative auditory event.