Center for Studies of Psychological Application, School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, People's Republic of China.
Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, People's Republic of China.
Exp Brain Res. 2020 Mar;238(3):587-600. doi: 10.1007/s00221-020-05737-7. Epub 2020 Jan 30.
Bottom-up inputs from multiple sensory modalities compete to reach perceptual consciousness. The sensory dominance effect refers to the phenomenon that stimuli from one sensory modality are preferentially selected over the other modalities. Top-down attention helps us to select task-relevant information while filtering out task-irrelevant distracting information. To investigate how top-down attention towards one specific modality modulates the sensory dominance effect, we incorporated the endogenous cue-target paradigm and an adapted version of the Colavita paradigm in the present study. The visual responses could either precede or fall behind the auditory responses, i.e., the visual vs. auditory precedence trials. The direction of the sensory dominance was defined as the proportion of the visual vs. auditory precedence bimodal trials, and the magnitude of the sensory dominance was calculated as the difference in reaction times between the first and the second responses in the bimodal trials. Results from the present three experiments consistently showed that when attention was voluntarily directed to the visual modality, the visual dominance occurred more frequently than the auditory dominance, and the magnitude of the visual dominance was significantly larger than the auditory dominance. This pattern of results was independent of the delivery modality of the cue. The present results thus provide direct empirical evidence showing that endogenous attention towards one specific sensory modality modulates both the direction and the size of sensory dominance.
来自多种感觉模式的自下而上的输入竞争达到知觉意识。感觉优势效应是指一种现象，即来自一种感觉模式的刺激优先于其他感觉模式被选择。自上而下的注意力有助于我们选择与任务相关的信息，同时过滤掉与任务无关的干扰信息。为了研究自上而下的注意力对特定感觉模式的调制如何影响感觉优势效应，我们在本研究中结合了内源性线索-目标范式和 Colavita 范式的改编版。视觉反应可以先于或落后于听觉反应，即视觉与听觉优先试验。感觉优势的方向被定义为视觉与听觉双模态试验中视觉与听觉的比例，感觉优势的大小被计算为双模态试验中第一和第二反应之间的反应时间差异。本三个实验的结果一致表明，当注意力自愿指向视觉模式时，视觉优势比听觉优势更频繁出现，并且视觉优势的大小明显大于听觉优势。这种结果模式独立于线索的传递模式。因此，本研究结果提供了直接的经验证据，表明对特定感觉模式的内源性注意力调节感觉优势的方向和大小。
