Retrospective auditory cues can improve detection of near-threshold visual targets

Viola Störmer,Jérôme Sackur,Daphné Rimsky-Robert,Claire Sergent

doi:10.1038/s41598-019-55261-0

Abstract

Recent studies have demonstrated that visually cueing attention towards a stimulus location after its disappearance can facilitate visual processing of the target and increase task performance. Here, we tested whether such retro-cueing effects can also occur across different sensory modalities, as cross-modal facilitation has been shown in pre-cueing studies using auditory stimuli prior to the onset of a visual target. In the present study, participants detected low-contrast Gabor patches in a speeded response task. These patches were presented in the left or right visual periphery, preceded or followed by a lateralized and task-irrelevant sound at 4 stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOA; −600 ms, −150 ms, +150 ms, +450 ms). We found that pre-cueing at the −150 ms SOA led to a general increase in detection performance irrespective of the sound’s location relative to the target. On top of this temporal effect, sound-cues also had a spatially specific effect, with further improvement when cue and target originated from the same location. Critically, the temporal effect was absent, but the spatial effect was present in the short-SOA retro-cueing condition (+150 ms). Drift-diffusion analysis of the response time distributions allowed us to better characterize the evidenced effects. Overall, our results show that sounds can facilitate visual processing, both pre- and retro-actively, indicative of a flexible and multisensory attentional system that underlies our conscious visual experience.

Highlights

Recent studies have demonstrated that visually cueing attention towards a stimulus location after its disappearance can facilitate visual processing of the target and increase task performance
Recent studies[7,8] used an attentional spatial cueing paradigm[9] in which a cue could appear before or after the appearance of a target event to test the broadcasting vs. local feedback account of conscious perception: if conscious perception correlates with the broadcast of sensory information via top-down attention across the brain, retrospectively orienting attention towards the sensory trace of a target could potentially promote initially unseen stimuli into consciousness
While there exists evidence that these could interact through rapid direct pathways between the sensory cortices with no involvement of supra-modal structures[12], this can be avoided by using stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs) above 100 ms[13]

Summary

Introduction

Recent studies have demonstrated that visually cueing attention towards a stimulus location after its disappearance can facilitate visual processing of the target and increase task performance. If conscious perception is decided during the initial sensory processing steps, as assumed by the local feedback account, a retro-cue that directs attention to the target retroactively should not influence whether the stimulus is consciously perceived or not Previous research tested these two predictions by asking participants to judge the orientation of low-contrast Gabor patches while spatial visual retro-cues attracted attention either to the target’s past location or to the opposite location. These studies showed that such retrospective cueing of exogenous spatial attention facilitated conscious perception of the past target – similar to previously observed pre-cueing effects where the cue is presented at the target location prior to its onset[9]. One might predict the contrary: if, as suggested by previous studies, retrospective cues retrospectively promote unseen stimuli into awareness, response times on those trials could be delayed since response time might be time-locked to the retro-cue rather than time-locked to the target presentation itself

Methods

Results

Conclusion