Chen Yi-Chuan, Spence Charles
Crossmodal Research Laboratory, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, 9 South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3UD, UK.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2017 Jun;24(3):690-707. doi: 10.3758/s13423-016-1154-y.
The extent to which attention modulates multisensory processing in a top-down fashion is still a subject of debate among researchers. Typically, cognitive psychologists interested in this question have manipulated the participants' attention in terms of single/dual tasking or focal/divided attention between sensory modalities. We suggest an alternative approach, one that builds on the extensive older literature highlighting hemispheric asymmetries in the distribution of spatial attention. Specifically, spatial attention in vision, audition, and touch is typically biased preferentially toward the right hemispace, especially under conditions of high perceptual load. We review the evidence demonstrating such an attentional bias toward the right in extinction patients and healthy adults, along with the evidence of such rightward-biased attention in multisensory experimental settings. We then evaluate those studies that have demonstrated either a more pronounced multisensory effect in right than in left hemispace, or else similar effects in the two hemispaces. The results suggest that the influence of rightward-biased attention is more likely to be observed when the crossmodal signals interact at later stages of information processing and under conditions of higher perceptual load-that is, conditions under which attention is perhaps a compulsory enhancer of information processing. We therefore suggest that the spatial asymmetry in attention may provide a useful signature of top-down attentional modulation in multisensory processing.
注意力以自上而下的方式调节多感官加工的程度仍是研究人员争论的一个话题。通常，对这个问题感兴趣的认知心理学家会根据单任务/双任务或在感觉模态之间的集中/分散注意力来操纵参与者的注意力。我们提出一种替代方法，该方法基于大量早期文献，这些文献强调了空间注意力分布中的半球不对称性。具体而言，视觉、听觉和触觉中的空间注意力通常优先偏向右侧半空间，尤其是在高感知负荷条件下。我们回顾了证明消退患者和健康成年人中存在这种向右的注意力偏向的证据，以及多感官实验环境中这种向右偏向注意力的证据。然后，我们评估那些表明右侧半空间比左侧半空间具有更明显的多感官效应，或者两个半空间具有相似效应的研究。结果表明，当跨模态信号在信息处理的后期阶段相互作用且处于较高感知负荷条件下时，即注意力可能是信息处理的强制性增强因素的条件下，更有可能观察到向右偏向注意力的影响。因此，我们认为注意力的空间不对称性可能为多感官加工中自上而下的注意力调节提供一个有用的标志。
