Chen Minran, Zhao Song, Yu Jiaqi, Leng Xuechen, Zhai Mengdie, Feng Chengzhi, Feng Wenfeng
Department of Psychology, School of Education, Soochow University, Suzhou 215123, China.
Research Center for Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Soochow University, Suzhou 215123, China.
Brain Sci. 2022 Sep 10;12(9):1229. doi: 10.3390/brainsci12091229.
It has been reported that attending to stimuli in visual modality can spread to task-irrelevant but synchronously presented stimuli in auditory modality, a phenomenon termed the cross-modal spread of attention, which could be either stimulus-driven or representation-driven depending on whether the visual constituent of an audiovisual object is further selected based on the object representation. The stimulus-driven spread of attention occurs whenever a task-irrelevant sound synchronizes with an attended visual stimulus, regardless of the cross-modal semantic congruency. The present study recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate whether the stimulus-driven cross-modal spread of attention could be modulated by audio-visual emotional congruency in a visual oddball task where emotion (positive/negative) was task-irrelevant. The results first demonstrated a prominent stimulus-driven spread of attention regardless of audio-visual emotional congruency by showing that for all audiovisual pairs, the extracted ERPs to the auditory constituents of audiovisual stimuli within the time window of 200-300 ms were significantly larger than ERPs to the same auditory stimuli delivered alone. However, the amplitude of this stimulus-driven auditory Nd component during 200-300 ms was significantly larger for emotionally incongruent than congruent audiovisual stimuli when their visual constituents' emotional valences were negative. Moreover, the Nd was sustained during 300-400 ms only for the incongruent audiovisual stimuli with emotionally negative visual constituents. These findings suggest that although the occurrence of the stimulus-driven cross-modal spread of attention is independent of audio-visual emotional congruency, its magnitude is nevertheless modulated even when emotion is task-irrelevant.
据报道，对视觉模态中的刺激的关注可以扩散到听觉模态中与任务无关但同时呈现的刺激上，这一现象被称为注意力的跨模态传播，它可能是由刺激驱动的，也可能是由表征驱动的，这取决于视听对象的视觉成分是否基于对象表征被进一步选择。无论跨模态语义一致性如何，只要与任务无关的声音与被关注的视觉刺激同步，就会发生由刺激驱动的注意力传播。本研究记录了事件相关电位（ERP），以调查在情绪（积极/消极）与任务无关的视觉Oddball任务中，由刺激驱动的跨模态注意力传播是否会受到视听情绪一致性的调节。结果首先表明，无论视听情绪一致性如何，都存在显著的由刺激驱动的注意力传播，这表现为对于所有视听对，在200 - 300毫秒的时间窗口内，提取的视听刺激听觉成分的ERP显著大于单独呈现相同听觉刺激时的ERP。然而，当视觉成分的情绪效价为负时，在200 - 300毫秒期间，这种由刺激驱动的听觉Nd成分的幅度在情绪不一致的视听刺激中比在一致的视听刺激中显著更大。此外，只有在视觉成分情绪为负的不一致视听刺激中，Nd在300 - 400毫秒期间持续存在。这些发现表明，虽然由刺激驱动的跨模态注意力传播的发生与视听情绪一致性无关，但其幅度即使在情绪与任务无关时也会受到调节。
