Suppression of Audiovisual Integration by Exogenous Unimodal Spatial Cue

Abstract

Previous studies have confirmed that exogenous attention enhanced the following response, however, investigations rarely focused on the influence of cue modality on interaction between exogenous attention and audiovisual integration (AVI). To clarify this question, a discrimination task was conducted. The results revealed that response to audiovisual stimuli was significantly faster than the response to visual or auditory stimuli (all $p < 0.001$), and a faster response to valid cue condition than to invalid cue or no cue condition (all $p < 0.01$). Additionally, greater peak benefit and larger area under the curve (AUC) in bimodal cue conditions than that in unimodal cue conditions. These findings proved that the exogenous cue speeds up the response to the following target; however, it decreased AVI effect, and the AVI effect decreased further in unimodal cue condition compared with that in bimodal cue condition. This result suggested that the exogenous bimodal cue elicits a much larger AVI effect.