McDonald J J, Ward L M
Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, 2136 West Mall, Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6T 1Z4.
Psychol Sci. 2000 Mar;11(2):167-71. doi: 10.1111/1467-9280.00233.
It is well known that sensory events of one modality can influence judgments of sensory events in other modalities. For example, people respond more quickly to a target appearing at the location of a previous cue than to a target appearing at another location, even when the two stimuli are from different modalities. Such cross-modal interactions suggest that involuntary spatial attention mechanisms are not entirely modality-specific. In the present study, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded to elucidate the neural basis and timing of involuntary, cross-modal spatial attention effects. We found that orienting spatial attention to an irrelevant sound modulates the ERP to a subsequent visual target over modality-specific, extrastriate visual cortex, but only after the initial stages of sensory processing are completed. These findings are consistent with the proposal that involuntary spatial attention orienting to auditory and visual stimuli involves shared, or at least linked, brain mechanisms.
众所周知，一种感觉模态的感觉事件会影响其他感觉模态中感觉事件的判断。例如，即使两种刺激来自不同的感觉模态，人们对出现在先前线索位置的目标的反应也比对出现在另一个位置的目标的反应更快。这种跨模态交互表明，非自愿空间注意机制并非完全特定于感觉模态。在本研究中，记录了事件相关脑电位（ERP），以阐明非自愿跨模态空间注意效应的神经基础和时间。我们发现，将空间注意定向到无关声音会在特定感觉模态的纹外视觉皮层上调节对后续视觉目标的ERP，但这仅在感觉处理的初始阶段完成之后。这些发现与以下观点一致：非自愿地将空间注意定向到听觉和视觉刺激涉及共享的，或至少是相关联的脑机制。
