Abstract
The auditory mismatch responses are elicited in absence of directed attention but are thought to reflect attention modulating effects. Little is known however, if the deviants in a stream of standards are specifically directing attention across modalities and how they interact with other attention directing signals such as emotions. We applied the well-established paradigm of left- or right-lateralized deviant syllables within a dichotic listening design. In a simple target detection paradigm with lateralized visual stimuli, we hypothesized that responses to visual stimuli would be speeded after ignored auditory deviants on the same side. Moreover, stimuli with negative valence in the visual domain could be expected to reduce this effect due to attention capture for this emotion, resulting in speeded responses to visual stimuli even when attention was directed to the opposite side by the auditory deviant beforehand. Reaction times of 17 subjects confirmed the speeding of responses after deviant events. However, reduced facilitation was observed for positive targets at the left after incongruent deviants, i.e., at the right ear. In particular, significant interactions of valence and visual field and of valence and spatial congruency emerged. Pre-attentive auditory processing may modulate attention in a spatially selective way. However, negative valence processing in the right hemisphere may override this effect. Resource allocation such as spatial attention is regulated dynamically by multimodal and emotion information processing.
Highlights
Spatial attention distribution serves to enable an efficient interaction with the environment
The importance of such a mechanism is reflected in the huge impact of impairments of attention in the left visual field—unilateral neglect—on simple activities of daily living in patients with right-hemisphere damage
Negative valence seems to serve as an attention “magnet”; it can narrow the attention focus accompanied by enhanced processing of the negative stimuli (Fenske and Eastwood, 2003)
Summary
Spatial attention distribution serves to enable an efficient interaction with the environment The importance of such a mechanism is reflected in the huge impact of impairments of attention in the left visual field—unilateral neglect—on simple activities of daily living in patients with right-hemisphere damage (for a review see Danckert and Ferber, 2006). Exogenous cues trigger stimulus-driven shifts of attention when appearing in the left or right hemispace, even if cue and target stimuli are presented in different modalities (e.g., Eimer and Driver, 2001). Another important factor concerning the distribution of attention in space is the salience of stimuli. A neural network of limbic regions like amygdala and insula with the anterior cingulate cortex is known to play a role in salience detection and evaluation (for a review see Seeley et al, 2007; Menon and Uddin, 2010; Santos et al, 2011)
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