State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
J Vis. 2020 Oct 1;20(10):21. doi: 10.1167/jov.20.10.21.
Previous research has demonstrated that biological motion (BM) cues can induce reflexive attentional orienting. This BM-triggered social attention has hitherto only been investigated within visual modality. It remains unknown whether and to what extent social attention induced by BM cues can occur across different sensory modalities. By introducing auditory stimuli to a modified central cueing paradigm, we showed that observers responded significantly faster to auditory targets presented in the walking direction of BM than in the opposite direction, reflecting the notion that BM cues can trigger cross-modal social attention. This effect was not due to the viewpoint effect of the global configuration and could be extended to local BM cues without any global configuration. Critically, such cross-modal social attention was sensitive to the orientation of BM cues and completely disappeared when critical biological characteristics were removed. Our findings, taken together, support the existence of a special multimodal attention mechanism tuned to life motion signals and shed new light on the unique and cross-modal nature of social attention.
先前的研究表明，生物运动（BM）线索可以引起反射性的注意力定向。这种由 BM 触发的社会注意力迄今为止仅在视觉模态中进行了研究。目前尚不清楚由 BM 线索引起的社会注意力是否以及在何种程度上可以跨越不同的感觉模态。通过在改良的中央提示范式中引入听觉刺激，我们发现观察者对 BM 行走方向呈现的听觉目标的反应明显快于相反方向，这反映了 BM 线索可以触发跨模态社会注意力的观点。这种效果不是全局配置的视角效应引起的，并且可以扩展到没有任何全局配置的局部 BM 线索。至关重要的是，这种跨模态社会注意力对 BM 线索的方向敏感，并且当去除关键的生物特征时，这种注意力完全消失。我们的研究结果表明，存在一种特殊的多模态注意机制，这种机制对生命运动信号具有敏感性，并为社会注意力的独特性和跨模态性质提供了新的视角。
