Auditory and visual perception of simultaneous verbal and nonverbal stimuli

Summary In an auditory experiment, digits and tonal sequences were presented simultaneously to both ears. In a visual experiment, words and nonsense figures had to be compared in both visual half-fields. The verbal stimuli were better reported from the right ear and right visual half-field. The nonverbal stimuli were reported equally well from both ears and visual half-fields. It appears that the processing of stimuli presented to both input channels depends on the type of the stimuli. These results point to a cerebral mechanism classifying incoming information to the brain and yielding an optimal processing of verbal and nonverbal stimuli by the cerebral hemispheres.This study was supported in part by grants 6.182-0.76 and 6.183-0.76 of the Swiss National Science Foundation to E. Perret.