Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Psychology, University College London, Gower Street, London, UK WC1E 6BT.
Trends Cogn Sci. 1998 Jul 1;2(7):254-62. doi: 10.1016/S1364-6613(98)01188-7.
Traditional studies of spatial attention consider only a single sensory modality at a time (e.g. just vision, or just audition). In daily life, however, our spatial attention often has to be coordinated across several modalities. This is a non-trivial problem, given that each modality initially codes space in entirely different ways. In the last five years, there has been a spate of studies on crossmodal attention. These have demonstrated numerous crossmodal links in spatial attention, such that attending to a particular location in one modality tends to produce corresponding shifts of attention in other modalities. The spatial coordinates of these crossmodal links illustrate that the internal representation of external space depends on extensive crossmodal integration. Recent neuroscience studies are discussed that suggest possible brain mechanisms for the crossmodal links in spatial attention.
传统的空间注意力研究一次只考虑一种单一的感觉模式(例如只有视觉或只有听觉)。然而,在日常生活中,我们的空间注意力往往需要在几种模式之间协调。这是一个不小的问题,因为每种模式最初都是以完全不同的方式对空间进行编码。在过去的五年中,关于跨模态注意力的研究如雨后春笋般涌现。这些研究证明了空间注意力中有许多跨模态的联系,例如,在一种模式中注意到一个特定的位置往往会导致在其他模式中产生相应的注意力转移。这些跨模态联系的空间坐标表明,外部空间的内部表示依赖于广泛的跨模态整合。本文还讨论了最近的神经科学研究,这些研究为空间注意力中的跨模态联系提供了可能的大脑机制。