Abstract
The extent to which attention modulates multisensory processing in a top-down fashion is still a subject of debate among researchers. Typically, cognitive psychologists interested in this question have manipulated the participants’ attention in terms of single/dual tasking or focal/divided attention between sensory modalities. We suggest an alternative approach, one that builds on the extensive older literature highlighting hemispheric asymmetries in the distribution of spatial attention. Specifically, spatial attention in vision, audition, and touch is typically biased preferentially toward the right hemispace, especially under conditions of high perceptual load. We review the evidence demonstrating such an attentional bias toward the right in extinction patients and healthy adults, along with the evidence of such rightward-biased attention in multisensory experimental settings. We then evaluate those studies that have demonstrated either a more pronounced multisensory effect in right than in left hemispace, or else similar effects in the two hemispaces. The results suggest that the influence of rightward-biased attention is more likely to be observed when the crossmodal signals interact at later stages of information processing and under conditions of higher perceptual load—that is, conditions under which attention is perhaps a compulsory enhancer of information processing. We therefore suggest that the spatial asymmetry in attention may provide a useful signature of top-down attentional modulation in multisensory processing.
Highlights
The extent to which attention modulates multisensory processing in a top-down fashion is still a subject of debate among researchers
Before we review the evidence for spatial attention asymmetrically modulating multisensory perception, it is important to consider whether certain phenomena of multisensory processing might themselves show some kind of spatial bias
Post-hoc t tests demonstrated that the accuracy was higher in the sound-present than in the sound-absent condition only at the 40-ms Interstimulus Interval (ISI) (p < .001). These results suggest that crossmodal facilitation occurred at a shorter ISI when the target letter was presented in the right rather than the left hemispace
Summary
Byanes et al (1994) Diesch (1995) Takeshima & Gyoba (2014) Takeshima & Gyoba (2014). presented in another (Spence & Driver, 1997b; Spence, Nicholls, & Driver, 2001). The research shows that the McGurk effect occurs more frequently when the visual stimulus (i.e., the lip movements) is presented in the left rather than the right hemispace (Baynes, Funnell, & Fowler, 1994; Diesch, 1995) This asymmetry has been explained in terms of a righthemisphere advantage for face processing (e.g., Borod et al, 1998; Ellis, 1983; Sergent, Ohta, & MacDonald, 1992). Takeshima and Gyoba (2014) recently demonstrated a larger auditory facilitation resulting from the presentation of a simultaneous tone on visual localization performance in the left as compared to the right hemispace Their suggestion was that this asymmetry could be attributed to the right hemisphere being specialized for the processing of spatial information (Kimura, 1969; Umiltà et al, 1974). Their suggestion was that this result reflects the left hemisphere’s specialization for linguistic processing (e.g., Geffen, Bradshaw, & Nettleton, 1972; Kimura, 1961; MacKain, Studdert-Kennedy, Spieker, & Stern, 1983; Scott, Blank, Rosen, & Wise, 2000). when proposing that any asymmetrical effect of multisensory processing can be attributed to spatial attention, such alternative explanations of the results will obviously need to be ruled out first, especially those leading to an expected advantage in the right hemispace
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