Hanada G M, Ahveninen J, Calabro F J, Yengo-Kahn A, Vaina L M
1Brain and Vision Research Laboratory, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA.
2Harvard Medical School, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Department of Radiology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Charlestown, MA, USA.
Multisens Res. 2019;32(1):45-65. doi: 10.1163/22134808-20181313. Epub 2018 Oct 24.
The everyday environment brings to our sensory systems competing inputs from different modalities. The ability to filter these multisensory inputs in order to identify and efficiently utilize useful spatial cues is necessary to detect and process the relevant information. In the present study, we investigate how feature-based attention affects the detection of motion across sensory modalities. We were interested to determine how subjects use intramodal, cross-modal auditory, and combined audiovisual motion cues to attend to specific visual motion signals. The results showed that in most cases, both the visual and the auditory cues enhance feature-based orienting to a transparent visual motion pattern presented among distractor motion patterns. Whereas previous studies have shown cross-modal effects of spatial attention, our results demonstrate a spread of cross-modal feature-based attention cues, which have been matched for the detection threshold of the visual target. These effects were very robust in comparisons of the effects of valid vs. invalid cues, as well as in comparisons between cued and uncued valid trials. The effect of intramodal visual, cross-modal auditory, and bimodal cues also increased as a function of motion-cue salience. Our results suggest that orienting to visual motion patterns among distracters can be facilitated not only by intramodal priors, but also by feature-based cross-modal information from the auditory system.
日常环境给我们的感觉系统带来了来自不同感觉模态的竞争性输入。为了识别并有效利用有用的空间线索而对这些多感觉输入进行过滤的能力，对于检测和处理相关信息而言是必要的。在本研究中，我们探究基于特征的注意力如何影响跨感觉模态的运动检测。我们感兴趣的是确定受试者如何利用模态内、跨模态听觉以及视听组合运动线索来关注特定的视觉运动信号。结果表明，在大多数情况下，视觉和听觉线索都会增强对呈现于干扰运动模式中的透明视觉运动模式的基于特征的定向。虽然先前的研究已经表明了空间注意力的跨模态效应，但我们的结果证明了基于特征的跨模态注意力线索的传播，这些线索在视觉目标的检测阈值方面是匹配的。在有效线索与无效线索效应的比较中，以及在有线索提示的有效试验与无线索提示的有效试验之间的比较中，这些效应都非常显著。模态内视觉、跨模态听觉和双峰线索的效应也随着运动线索显著性的增加而增强。我们的结果表明，在干扰物中对视觉运动模式的定向不仅可以通过模态内先验信息来促进，还可以通过来自听觉系统的基于特征的跨模态信息来促进。
