We have seen that attentive processes will ‘work hard’ to unite information into a coherent whole.
Even spatially separate visual and auditory stimuli can be joined if they appear to be synchronous (the ventriloquism effect).
When stimuli are not synchronous the system attempts to order the segments of the stimuli independently, resulting in distraction and lost information.
It is a ‘bottleneck’ in the ordering process that results in one stream of information interfering with the processing of another.
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