Abstract
By orienting attention, auditory cues can improve the discrimination of spatially congruent visual targets. Looming sounds that increase in intensity are processed preferentially by the brain. Thus, we investigated whether auditory looming cues can orient visuo-spatial attention more effectively than static and receding sounds. Specifically, different auditory cues could redirect attention away from a continuous central visuo-motor tracking task to peripheral visual targets that appeared occasionally. To investigate the time course of crossmodal cuing, Experiment 1 presented visual targets at different time-points across a 500 ms auditory cue’s presentation. No benefits were found for simultaneous audio-visual cue-target presentation. The largest crossmodal benefit occurred at early cue-target asynchrony onsets (i.e., CTOA = 250 ms), regardless of auditory cue type, which diminished at CTOA = 500 ms for static and receding cues. However, auditory looming cues showed a late crossmodal cuing benefit at CTOA = 500 ms. Experiment 2 showed that this late auditory looming cue benefit was independent of the cue’s intensity when the visual target appeared. Thus, we conclude that the late crossmodal benefit throughout an auditory looming cue’s presentation is due to its increasing intensity profile. The neural basis for this benefit and its ecological implications are discussed.
Highlights
Whilst driving a car, we have to concentrate on the road ahead while remaining alert to sudden events in our visual periphery, such as the sudden appearance of a jaywalking pedestrian
We investigate whether auditory looming cues might exert a crossmodal influence on visuo-spatial attention, across its presentation duration, in a way that might differ from other similar auditory cues
We performed one-tailed paired samples t-tests (α = 0.05) and confirmed that all auditory cues induced a late crossmodal cue benefit on visual targets, compared to instances when targets were not preceded by an auditory cue
Summary
We have to concentrate on the road ahead while remaining alert to sudden events in our visual periphery, such as the sudden appearance of a jaywalking pedestrian. Independent of cuing benefits, auditory looming sounds might even improve the discrimination of simultaneously presented visual targets (cf., Leo et al.16), given that they are known to generally facilitate visual processing[37,38] In both cases, such cuing benefits of reflexive visuo-spatial attention can be expected to diminish with time and, potentially, throughout the presentation of the sounds themselves. The ongoing presentation of looming sounds (but not static and receding sounds) might indicate the continuous approach of a visual target, motivating participants to redirect but to sustain their attention[40] This would result in cuing benefits that last until the end of the auditory cue’s presentation
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