Top-down attention modulates the direction and magnitude of sensory dominance.

Abstract

Bottom-up inputs from multiple sensory modalities compete to reach perceptual consciousness. The sensory dominance effect refers to the phenomenon that stimuli from one sensory modality are preferentially selected over the other modalities. Top-down attention helps us to select task-relevant information while filtering out task-irrelevant distracting information. To investigate how top-down attention towards one specific modality modulates the sensory dominance effect, we incorporated the endogenous cue-target paradigm and an adapted version of the Colavita paradigm in the present study. The visual responses could either precede or fall behind the auditory responses, i.e., the visual vs. auditory precedence trials. The direction of the sensory dominance was defined as the proportion of the visual vs. auditory precedence bimodal trials, and the magnitude of the sensory dominance was calculated as the difference in reaction times between the first and the second responses in the bimodal trials. Results from the present three experiments consistently showed that when attention was voluntarily directed to the visual modality, the visual dominance occurred more frequently than the auditory dominance, and the magnitude of the visual dominance was significantly larger than the auditory dominance. This pattern of results was independent of the delivery modality of the cue. The present results thus provide direct empirical evidence showing that endogenous attention towards one specific sensory modality modulates both the direction and the size of sensory dominance.