Li Jianhua, Hua Lin, Deng Sophia W
Department of Psychology, University of Macau, Macau, China.
Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, University of Macau, Macau, China.
Front Psychol. 2024 May 3;15:1380196. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1380196. eCollection 2024.
Our brain constantly processes multisensory inputs to make decisions and guide behaviors, but how goal-relevant processes are influenced by irrelevant information is unclear. Here, we investigated the effects of intermodal and intramodal task-irrelevant information on visual and auditory categorical decision-making. In both visual and auditory tasks, we manipulated the modality of irrelevant inputs (visual vs. auditory vs. none) and used linear discrimination analysis of EEG and hierarchical drift-diffusion modeling (HDDM) to identify when and how task-irrelevant information affected decision-relevant processing. The results revealed modality-specific impacts of irrelevant inputs on visual and auditory categorical decision-making. The distinct effects on the visual task were shown on the neural components, with auditory distractors amplifying the sensory processing whereas visual distractors amplifying the post-sensory process. Conversely, the distinct effects on the auditory task were shown in behavioral performance and underlying cognitive processes. Visual distractors facilitate behavioral performance and affect both stages, but auditory distractors interfere with behavioral performance and impact on the sensory processing rather than the post-sensory decision stage. Overall, these findings suggested that auditory distractors affect the sensory processing stage of both tasks while visual distractors affect the post-sensory decision stage of visual categorical decision-making and both stages of auditory categorical decision-making. This study provides insights into how humans process information from multiple sensory modalities during decision-making by leveraging modality-specific impacts.
我们的大脑不断处理多感官输入以做出决策并指导行为，但目标相关过程如何受到无关信息的影响尚不清楚。在此，我们研究了跨模态和模态内任务无关信息对视觉和听觉分类决策的影响。在视觉和听觉任务中，我们操纵无关输入的模态（视觉 vs. 听觉 vs. 无），并使用脑电图的线性判别分析和分层漂移扩散模型（HDDM）来确定任务无关信息何时以及如何影响决策相关处理。结果揭示了无关输入对视觉和听觉分类决策的模态特异性影响。对视觉任务的不同影响体现在神经成分上，听觉干扰物增强感觉处理，而视觉干扰物增强感觉后处理。相反，对听觉任务的不同影响体现在行为表现和潜在认知过程中。视觉干扰物促进行为表现并影响两个阶段，但听觉干扰物干扰行为表现并影响感觉处理而非感觉后决策阶段。总体而言，这些发现表明听觉干扰物影响两个任务的感觉处理阶段，而视觉干扰物影响视觉分类决策的感觉后决策阶段以及听觉分类决策的两个阶段。本研究通过利用模态特异性影响，深入了解了人类在决策过程中如何处理来自多种感官模态的信息。
