Santangelo Valerio, Van der Lubbe Rob H J, Belardinelli Marta Olivetti, Postma Albert
Department of Psychology, University of Rome La Sapienza, via dei Marsi 78, 00185, Rome, Italy.
Exp Brain Res. 2006 Aug;173(1):40-8. doi: 10.1007/s00221-006-0361-6. Epub 2006 Feb 18.
The aim of this study was to establish whether spatial attention triggered by bimodal exogenous cues acts differently as compared to unimodal and crossmodal exogenous cues due to crossmodal integration. In order to investigate this issue, we examined cuing effects in discrimination tasks and compared these effects in a condition wherein a visual target was preceded by both visual and auditory exogenous cues delivered simultaneously at the same side (bimodal cue), with conditions wherein the visual target was preceded by either a visual (unimodal cue) or an auditory cue (crossmodal cue). The results of two experiments revealed that cuing effects on RTs in these three conditions with an SOA of 200 ms had comparable magnitudes. Differences at a longer SOA of 600 ms (inhibition of return for bimodal cues, Experiment 1) disappeared when catch trials were included (in Experiment 2). The current data do not support an additional influence of crossmodal integration on exogenous orienting, but are well in agreement with the existence of a supramodal spatial attention module that allocates attentional resources towards stimulated locations for different sensory modalities.
本研究的目的是确定由于跨通道整合，由双峰外源性线索触发的空间注意力与单峰和跨通道外源性线索相比是否有不同的作用。为了研究这个问题，我们在辨别任务中检查了线索效应，并将在视觉目标之前同时在同一侧呈现视觉和听觉外源性线索（双峰线索）的情况下的这些效应，与视觉目标之前呈现视觉线索（单峰线索）或听觉线索（跨通道线索）的情况进行了比较。两个实验的结果表明，在这三种条件下，当刺激间隔为200毫秒时，线索对反应时间的影响幅度相当。当纳入捕捉试验时（实验2），在更长的600毫秒刺激间隔下的差异（双峰线索的返回抑制，实验1）消失了。目前的数据不支持跨通道整合对外源性定向有额外影响，但与存在一个超模态空间注意力模块相一致，该模块将注意力资源分配到针对不同感觉模态的受刺激位置。
