On listening where we look: the fragility of a phenomenon.

The role of eye position information has been the subject of some debate in the literature on the visual facilitation of auditory localization and attention. In one particularly compelling study, Reisberg, Scheiber, and Potemken (1981) found that fixation position strongly influenced subjects' recall performance in a binaural selective-listening task. The present paper describes repeated failures to demonstrate the eye position effect under conditions similar to those of the original study, thus challenging the robustness of this oft-cited phenomenon of "listening where we look."