Crossmodal Research Laboratory, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, OX1 3UD, Oxford, UK.
Neurosci Lett. 2010 Jul 26;479(2):102-6. doi: 10.1016/j.neulet.2010.05.035. Epub 2010 May 16.
Temporally synchronous, auditory cues can facilitate participants' performance on dynamic visual search tasks. Making auditory cues spatially informative with regard to the target location can reduce search latencies still further. In the present study, we investigated how multisensory integration, and temporal and spatial attention, might conjointly influence participants' performance on an elevation discrimination task for a masked visual target presented in a rapidly-changing sequence of masked visual distractors. Participants were presented with either spatially uninformative (centrally presented), spatially valid (with the target side), or spatially invalid tones that were synchronous with the presentation of the visual target. Participants responded significantly more accurately following the presentation of the spatially valid as compared to the uninformative or invalid auditory cues. Participants endogenously shifted their attention to the likely location of the target indicated by the valid spatial auditory cue (reflecting top-down, cognitive processing mechanisms), which facilitated their processing of the visual target over and above any bottom-up benefits associated solely with the synchronous presentation of the auditory and visual stimuli. The results of the present study therefore suggest that crossmodal attention (both spatial and temporal) and multisensory integration can work in parallel to facilitate people's ability to most efficiently respond to multisensory information.
时间同步的听觉线索可以促进参与者在动态视觉搜索任务中的表现。使听觉线索在目标位置上具有空间信息，可以进一步减少搜索延迟。在本研究中，我们调查了多感觉整合以及时间和空间注意如何共同影响参与者在一个遮挡视觉目标的快速变化的遮挡视觉干扰序列中进行的海拔辨别任务的表现。参与者接受了空间上无信息（中央呈现）、空间上有效（目标侧）或空间上无效的音调，这些音调与视觉目标的呈现是同步的。与呈现空间上无效或无信息的听觉线索相比，参与者在呈现空间上有效的听觉线索后表现出更高的准确性。参与者自主地将注意力转移到有效空间听觉线索指示的目标可能位置（反映自上而下的认知处理机制），这有助于他们处理视觉目标，而不仅仅是与听觉和视觉刺激同步呈现相关的任何自下而上的好处。因此，本研究的结果表明，跨模态注意（空间和时间）和多感觉整合可以并行工作，以提高人们对多感觉信息的有效反应能力。
