Cognitive Neuroscience, Institute of Neuroscience & Medicine (INM-3), Research Centre Juelich, 52425, Juelich, Germany.
Institute of Neuroscience & Medicine (INM-4), Research Centre Juelich, 52425, Juelich, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2018 Jan 19;8(1):1210. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-19593-7.
The deployment of spatial attention is highly sensitive to stimulus predictability. Despite evidence for strong crossmodal links in spatial attentional systems, it remains to be elucidated how concurrent but divergent predictions for targets in different sensory modalities are integrated. In a series of behavioral studies, we investigated the processing of modality-specific expectancies using a multimodal cueing paradigm in which auditory cues predicted the location of visual or tactile targets with modality-specific cue predictability. The cue predictability for visual and tactile targets was manipulated independently. A Bayesian ideal observer model with a weighting factor was applied to trial-wise individual response speed to investigate how the two probabilistic contexts are integrated. Results showed that the degree of integration depended on the level of predictability and on the divergence of the modality-specific probabilistic contexts (Experiments 1-2). However, when the two probabilistic contexts were matched in their level of predictability and were highly divergent (Experiment 3), higher separate processing was favored, especially when visual targets were processed. These findings suggest that modality-specific predictions are flexibly integrated according to their reliability, supporting the hypothesis of separate modality-specific attentional systems that are however linked to guarantee an efficient deployment of spatial attention across the senses.
空间注意的分配对刺激的可预测性高度敏感。尽管有证据表明空间注意系统中存在很强的跨模态联系，但仍需要阐明如何整合不同感觉模态中目标的并发但不同的预测。在一系列行为研究中，我们使用多模态提示范式研究了模态特异性预期的处理，其中听觉提示以模态特异性提示可预测性预测视觉或触觉目标的位置。视觉和触觉目标的提示可预测性是独立操纵的。应用具有权重因子的贝叶斯理想观察者模型来分析个体在逐次试验中的反应速度，以研究两种概率情境是如何整合的。结果表明，整合程度取决于可预测性水平和模态特异性概率情境的离散程度（实验 1-2）。然而，当两个概率情境在可预测性水平上相匹配且高度离散时（实验 3），更倾向于进行更高的独立处理，尤其是在处理视觉目标时。这些发现表明，模态特异性预测是根据其可靠性灵活整合的，这支持了独立的模态特异性注意系统的假设，这些系统相互联系以确保在不同感觉之间有效地分配空间注意。
