Can attention be allocated to sensory modalities?

Abstract

Three experiments examined the effects of attention allocation to the modalities of vision, audition, and touch. The first two experiments utilized a simultaneous-successive comparison. The simultaneous procedure involved simultaneous monitoring of all three sensory modalities for the presence of a near-threshold stimulus. The successive condition allowed S to give his full attention to each sensory modality in turn. There was no advantage for the successive condition, whether the task consisted of detection of a single stimulus (Experiment I) or detection of the absence of one of many stimuli (Experiment II). Experiment III used a different paradigm to extend these results and bridge the gap between these results, those of Eijkman and Vendrik (1965), and those of Moray (1973a, b). We concluded that selective allocation of attention to sensory modalities does not affect the early stages of perceptual processing.