Four experiments investigated whether irrelevant sounds can influence the perception of
lights in a visual temporal order judgment task, where participants judged which of two lights
appeared first. In Experiment 1, presenting a sound before the first light and after the second
light improved performance relative to baseline (sounds appearing simultaneously with the
lights), as if the sounds pulled the perception of lights further apart in time. Experiment 2
ruled out an alerting explanation for this effect and indicated that the performance …