Spatial attention modulates spatiotemporal interactions between vision and audition
Poster Presentation

Daniel Sanabria
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford

Salvador Soto-Faraco
University of Barcelona

Charles Spence
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford

     Abstract ID Number: 61
     Full text: Not available
     Last modified: March 17, 2005

Abstract
We investigated whether audiovisual spatiotemporal interactions could be modulated by the orienting of endogenous and exogenous spatial attention. Participants were asked to discriminate the direction to which an auditory stream appeared to move (left-to-right or right-to-left) while ignoring a synchronously-presented visual stream that could move either in the same (congruent) or opposite (incongruent) direction as the target auditory stream. Both target and distractor streams could be presented either above or below (15cm) a fixation point. In Experiment 1, attention was endogenously oriented either to the top, bottom or both spatial locations by manipulating the proportion of trials presented at a given location within a block. In Experiment 2, attention was endogenously oriented to the top or bottom location by means of a predictive peripheral visual cue. In Experiment 3, attention was exogenously attracted to the top or bottom location by means of a non-predictive peripheral visual cue. Consistently, in all three experiments the congruency effect (measured as the difference in accuracy between congruent and incongruent direction trials) was reduced in the attended location as compared to the unattended location. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of an attentional spatial modulation of spatiotemporal interactions between audition and vision.