Faculty of Human Sciences, Department of Psychology, MSH Medical School Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany.
ICAN Insitute of Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, MSH Medical School Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany.
Behav Brain Funct. 2022 Sep 22;18(1):10. doi: 10.1186/s12993-022-00195-3.
Responses to a visual target stimulus in an exogenous spatial cueing paradigm are usually faster if cue and target occur in the same rather than in different locations (i.e., valid vs. invalid), although perceptual conditions for cue and target processing are otherwise equivalent. This cueing validity effect can be increased by adding emotional (task-unrelated) content to the cue. In contrast, adding a secondary non-emotional sensory modality to the cue (bimodal), has not consistently yielded increased cueing effects in previous studies. Here, we examined the interplay of bimodally presented cue content (i.e., emotional vs. neutral), by using combined visual-auditory cues. Specifically, the current ERP-study investigated whether bimodal presentation of fear-related content amplifies deployment of spatial attention to the cued location.
A behavioral cueing validity effect occurred selectively in trials in which both aspects of the cue (i.e., face and voice) were related to fear. Likewise, the posterior contra-ipsilateral P1-activity in valid trials was significantly larger when both cues were fear-related than in all other cue conditions. Although the P3a component appeared uniformly increased in invalidly cued trials, regardless of cue content, a positive LPC deflection, starting about 450 ms after target onset, was, again, maximal for the validity contrast in trials associated with bimodal presentation of fear-related cues.
Simultaneous presentation of fear-related stimulus information in the visual and auditory modality appears to increase sustained visual attention (impairing disengagement of attention from the cued location) and to affect relatively late stages of target processing.
在外源空间提示范式中，如果提示和目标出现在相同位置而不是不同位置（即有效 vs. 无效），对视觉目标刺激的反应通常会更快，尽管提示和目标的感知条件是等同的。通过向提示添加情感（与任务无关）内容，可以增加提示有效性效应。相比之下，在先前的研究中，向提示添加次要的非情感感觉模态（双模态）并没有一致地产生增加的提示效应。在这里，我们通过使用组合的视觉-听觉提示来研究双模态呈现的提示内容（即情绪与中性）之间的相互作用。具体来说，当前的 ERP 研究调查了恐惧相关内容的双模态呈现是否会放大对提示位置的空间注意的部署。
仅在提示的两个方面（即面孔和声音）都与恐惧相关的试验中出现了行为提示有效性效应。同样，在有效试验中，当两个提示都是与恐惧相关时，后对侧 P1 活动明显大于所有其他提示条件。尽管 P3a 成分在无效提示试验中无论提示内容如何都普遍增加，但在与恐惧相关的双模态呈现相关的试验中，大约在目标出现后 450 毫秒开始的正 LPC 偏移再次达到有效性对比的最大值。
同时呈现视觉和听觉模式的恐惧相关刺激信息似乎会增加持续的视觉注意力（阻碍注意力从提示位置脱离），并影响目标处理的相对较晚阶段。
