Modulation of spatial attention to visual targets by emotional environmental sounds.

Neil R Harrison,Simon J Davies

doi:10.3922/j.psns.2013.3.02

Abstract

research has shown that visual spatial attention can be modulated by emotional prosody cues, but it is not known whether such crossmodal modulation of visual attention is associated with the engagement or disengagement of attentional resources. To test this, we employed a modified spatial cueing task, where participants indicated whether a visual target appeared either on the left or the right, after hearing a spatially non-predictive peripheral sound. Prior studies using prosody cues have found that modulation of visual attention by emotional auditory cues was lateralized, but this may have been due to the speech content of the stimuli; here instead we used non-speech environmental sounds. The sound was either emotional (pleasant, unpleasant) or neutral, and was presented either on the same side as the visual target ('valid' trial) or on the opposite side ('invalid' trial). For the cue validity index (RT to invalid cue minus RT to valid cue), we found differences between emotional and neutral cues, but only for visual targets presented in the right hemifield; here the cue validity index was lower for unpleasant compared to neutral and pleasant cues. Absolute RTs for targets on the right were faster for invalid trials following unpleasant cues, compared to pleasant and neutral cues, indicating that the reduced cue validity effect was due to faster disengagement from unpleasant auditory cues. Further, our results show that the laterality effect is related to the emotional nature of the cues, rather than the speech content of the stimuli. Keywords: emotion, crossmodal, attention, spatial, cueing. Received 05 July 2013; received in revised form 08 August 2013; accepted 17 August 2013. Available online 23 December 2013.

Highlights

The perceptual system receives information from multiple modalities, and it is well-known that a stimulus in one modality can modify the processing of a cue presented in a different modality
To rule out whether the laterality effect was due to the speech content of the cues, we considered it important to test whether crossmodal spatial cueing effects are lateralized when employing non-speech environmental sounds, which, compared to speech sounds, are known to activate cortical regions more bilaterally (Meyer, Zysset, von Cramon, Alter, 2005)
The current study investigated the effects of emotional auditory cues on the allocation of visual spatial attention

Summary

Introduction

The perceptual system receives information from multiple modalities, and it is well-known that a stimulus in one modality can modify the processing of a cue presented in a different modality (for review see e.g., Driver & Noesselt, 2008). An important feature of multisensory processing is the ability of a cue in one modality to direct attention towards a particular region of space, which can result in enhanced processing of a signal presented at the same location in a separate modality (for review see Eimer & Driver, 2001). This ability of a stimulus in one modality to act as an involuntary spatial cue for a stimulus in a separate modality has generally been studied using non-affective cues such as beeps and light flashes (e.g., McDonald, Teder-Sälejärvi, & Hilyard, 2000; McDonald & Ward, 2000; Spence & Driver, 1997).

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Conclusion