Abstract
Cross-modal spatial cueing can affect performance in a visual search task. For example, search performance improves if a visual target and an auditory cue originate from the same spatial location, and it deteriorates if they originate from different locations. Moreover, it has recently been postulated that multisensory settings, i.e., experimental settings, in which critical stimuli are concurrently presented in different sensory modalities (e.g., visual and auditory), may trigger asymmetries in visuospatial attention. Thereby, a facilitation has been observed for visual stimuli presented in the right compared to the left visual space. However, it remains unclear whether auditory cueing of attention differentially affects search performance in the left and the right hemifields in audio-visual search tasks. The present study investigated whether spatial asymmetries would occur in a search task with cross-modal spatial cueing. Participants completed a visual search task that contained no auditory cues (i.e., unimodal visual condition), spatially congruent, spatially incongruent, and spatially non-informative auditory cues. To further assess participants’ accuracy in localising the auditory cues, a unimodal auditory spatial localisation task was also administered. The results demonstrated no left/right asymmetries in the unimodal visual search condition. Both an additional incongruent, as well as a spatially non-informative, auditory cue resulted in lateral asymmetries. Thereby, search times were increased for targets presented in the left compared to the right hemifield. No such spatial asymmetry was observed in the congruent condition. However, participants’ performance in the congruent condition was modulated by their tone localisation accuracy. The findings of the present study demonstrate that spatial asymmetries in multisensory processing depend on the validity of the cross-modal cues, and occur under specific attentional conditions, i.e., when visual attention has to be reoriented towards the left hemifield.
Highlights
In everyday life, we perceive our surroundings by integrating information obtained from all of our senses
In a unimodal, overt visual search task requiring serial search, gaze and visual attention are continuously shifted across the entire visual search field, until the target is found
The results suggest that these spatial asymmetries in the search time (ST) are due to an increase in the costs associated with the detection of targets presented in the left hemifield, rather than to a decrease in STs for targets presented in the right hemifield
Summary
We perceive our surroundings by integrating information obtained from all of our senses. In a search task with cross-modal spatial cueing, the beneficial effect of the spatial congruency between an auditory stimulus and a visual target has been commonly explained by means of attentional factors. The spatial auditory cue limits the effective extent of the visual search field, and enhances visual attentional processing in the cued area, which results in an improved target detection performance [13, 14]. The spatial origin of the auditory cue and the position of the visual target do not coincide, attention has to first be disengaged from the incorrectly cued location and shifted (i.e., reoriented) to the target location, which results in an impaired target detection performance (e.g., [2, 13, 15])
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