Does valence in the visual domain influence the spatial attention after auditory deviants? Exploratory data

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.