Abstract
Factors influencing crossmodal interactions are manifold and operate in a stimulus-driven, bottom-up fashion, as well as via top-down control. Here, we evaluate the interplay of stimulus congruence and attention in a visual-tactile task. To this end, we used a matching paradigm requiring the identification of spatial patterns that were concurrently presented visually on a computer screen and haptically to the fingertips by means of a Braille stimulator. Stimulation in our paradigm was always bimodal with only the allocation of attention being manipulated between conditions. In separate blocks of the experiment, participants were instructed to (a) focus on a single modality to detect a specific target pattern, (b) pay attention to both modalities to detect a specific target pattern, or (c) to explicitly evaluate if the patterns in both modalities were congruent or not. For visual as well as tactile targets, congruent stimulus pairs led to quicker and more accurate detection compared to incongruent stimulation. This congruence facilitation effect was more prominent under divided attention. Incongruent stimulation led to behavioral decrements under divided attention as compared to selectively attending a single sensory channel. Additionally, when participants were asked to evaluate congruence explicitly, congruent stimulation was associated with better performance than incongruent stimulation. Our results extend previous findings from audiovisual studies, showing that stimulus congruence also resulted in behavioral improvements in visuotactile pattern matching. The interplay of stimulus processing and attentional control seems to be organized in a highly flexible fashion, with the integration of signals depending on both bottom-up and top-down factors, rather than occurring in an ‘all-or-nothing’ manner.
Highlights
Our natural environment is inherently multisensory and requires continuous simultaneous processing and accurate combination of inputs from the different sensory systems to create meaningful percepts
Though clearly relevant for organizing and streamlining the flow of perceptual information, few studies have focused on the influence of modality specific selective attention versus distributed crossmodal attention for multisensory processing (e.g. [1,2,3,4])
We focus on interactions between vision and touch and the question how performance is affected by crossmodal stimulus congruence under different attentional demands
Summary
Our natural environment is inherently multisensory and requires continuous simultaneous processing and accurate combination of inputs from the different sensory systems to create meaningful percepts. Two important factors influencing crossmodal integration are stimulus congruence and attention. While crossmodal stimulus congruence is thought to facilitate cognitive processing in a bottom-up manner, top-down attention allows us to dynamically select from the available information and process relevant aspects while ignoring irrelevant others. If the perceived visual and tactile features of the different keys at your hand are sparse, it might be the combination of the two modalities that enables you to identify the correct key. Though clearly relevant for organizing and streamlining the flow of perceptual information, few studies have focused on the influence of modality specific selective attention versus distributed crossmodal attention for multisensory processing We focus on interactions between vision and touch and the question how performance is affected by crossmodal stimulus congruence under different attentional demands
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