Santangelo Valerio, Ho Cristy, Spence Charles
University of Oxford, Oxford, England.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2008 Apr;15(2):398-403. doi: 10.3758/pbr.15.2.398.
We assessed the influence ofmultisensory interactions on the exogenous orienting of spatial attention by comparing the ability of auditory, tactile, and audiotactile exogenous cues to capture visuospatial attention under conditions of no perceptual load versus high perceptual load. In Experiment 1, participants discriminated the elevation of visual targets preceded by either unimodal or bimodal cues under conditions of either a high perceptual load (involving the monitoring of a rapidly presented central stream of visual letters for occasionally presented target digits) or no perceptual load (when the central stream was replaced by a fixation point). All of the cues captured spatial attention in the no-load condition, whereas only the bimodal cues captured visuospatial attention in the high-load condition. In Experiment 2, we ruled out the possibility that the presentation of any changing stimulus at fixation (i.e., a passively monitored stream of letters) would eliminate exogenous orienting, which instead appears to be a consequence of high perceptual load conditions (Experiment 1). These results demonstrate that multisensory cues capture spatial attention more effectively than unimodal cues under conditions of concurrent perceptual load.
我们通过比较在无感知负荷与高感知负荷条件下，听觉、触觉以及听觉 - 触觉外源性线索捕获视觉空间注意的能力，评估了多感官交互对外源性空间注意定向的影响。在实验1中，参与者在高感知负荷（即监测快速呈现的中央视觉字母流中偶尔出现的目标数字）或无感知负荷（中央视觉字母流被注视点取代）条件下，辨别由单峰或双峰线索引导的视觉目标的高度。在无负荷条件下，所有线索都能捕获空间注意，而在高负荷条件下，只有双峰线索能捕获视觉空间注意。在实验2中，我们排除了在注视点呈现任何变化刺激（即被动监测的字母流）会消除外源性定向的可能性，相反，这似乎是高感知负荷条件的结果（实验1）。这些结果表明，在同时存在感知负荷的条件下，多感官线索比单峰线索更有效地捕获空间注意。
