Auditory Inhibition Of Return Research Articles

Mechanisms underlying auditory and cross-modal emotional attentional biases: Engagement with and disengagement from aversive auditory stimuli

There has been no consistent conclusion concerning whether auditory spatial attention or visual spatial attention could be modulated by auditory aversive cues. In three experiments, we used direct aversive auditory stimuli (white noise) as cues and explored which subcomponents of attentional bias contribute to auditory and cross-modal spatial attention in unselected samples. In Experiment 1, in a dot-probe paradigm, we adopted auditory stimuli (aversive or neutral) as cues and a tick sound as target, and we set two stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) conditions: 150 ms and 500 ms. The results of experiment 1 showed that participants performed faster on congruent trials than on incongruent trials and participants exhibited an auditory emotional attentional bias to aversive auditory stimuli in 150 ms SOA condition. Subsequently, in experiment 2 and experiment 3, we employed an auditory emotional spatial cueing task using neutral and negative auditory stimuli as cues. Targets were auditory stimuli (Experiment 2) or visual stimuli (Experiment 3). The results of experiment 2 showed that participants performed faster to targets primed by negative cues than to those primed by neutral cues in valid condition; and performed slower to targets primed by negative cues than to those primed by neutral cues in invalid condition in 150 ms SOA condition. Experiment 2 revealed that speeded engagement with and delayed disengagement from aversive auditory stimuli were both present at a 150 ms SOA condition; at 500 ms SOA condition, only the former effect was present, and auditory inhibition of return was also observed. Experiment 3 produced similar results cross-modally, but cross-modal inhibition of return was not observed. In all experiments, we conclude that emotional attention can operate within the auditory modality and across sensory modalities, and that both engagement and disengagement bias contribute to auditory and cross-modal emotional attention.

Interaction between location- and frequency-based inhibition of return in human auditory system

Using a cue-target paradigm, this study investigated the interaction between location and frequency information processing in human auditory inhibition of return (IOR). The cue and the target varied in terms of location and frequency and participants were asked to perform a target detection, localization or frequency discrimination task. Results showed that, when neither location nor frequency of auditory stimuli was particularly relevant to the target detection task, there was a location-based IOR only if the cue and the target were identical in frequency and there was a frequency-based IOR only if the cue and the target were presented at the same location. When a particular feature of auditory stimuli, whether location or frequency, was directly relevant to the current task, the IOR effect was evident for this feature only if the cue and the target differed on the task-irrelevant feature, while the IOR effect was eliminated for the task-relevant feature when the cue and the target had the same task-irrelevant feature. Similarly, the IOR effect based on the task-irrelevant feature was evident when the cue and the target differed on the task-relevant feature, and was eliminated or reversed when the cue and the target shared the task-relevant feature. Theoretical implications of these findings for auditory IOR are discussed.

Event-related potential evidence for attentional inhibition of return in audition.

Orienting attention to a spatial location facilitates responding to a subsequent target at that location, but inhibits the response if attention is oriented away from that location before the target appears there. This inhibitory effect of attention re-orienting, called inhibition of return (IOR), occurs in vision, hearing, touch, and cross-modally, and has been well studied behaviorally. However, little is known about its underlying neural mechanism(s). We report a study of the neural mechanism of auditory IOR using event-related potentials (ERPs). Auditory IOR was associated with elimination, but not reversal, of the Nd1 difference wave. Previous research indicates that the Nd1 represents an enhanced neural response to attended sounds. Also, auditory IOR was associated with a delay in the latency of the peak of the N1 component of the ERP at parietal sites. These effects are consistent with the accounts if inhibition of attention return that have been proposed for IOR, but are somewhat different from effects found in analogous ERP studies of visual IOR.

Predictability of the cue-target relation and the time-course of auditory inhibition of return.

The possibility that the time-course of auditory inhibition of return (IOR) might depend on the temporal or spatial predictability of the cue-target relation was investigated. In all the experiments, a location cue was followed by a target that was to be localized. An inhibitory effect became apparent at a longer stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) when either the temporal or the spatial relation was predictable, rather than when either was unpredictable. A facilitative effect was apparent at a 100-msec SOA, irrespective of the predictability of the cue-target relation. These results establish that the time-course of the inhibitory component of location-based auditory IOR depends on the predictability of the temporal and spatial relations of cue and target. The theoretical implications of these results are considered, and a dual-process model of auditory selective attention is offered.

Inhibition of return following an auditory cue. The role of central reorienting events.

It is currently controversial whether auditory events produce inhibition of return (IOR). Although some authors argue that this can arise, others propose that peripheral auditory cues do not produce the characteristic IOR pattern of delayed detection latencies for ipsilaterally presented auditory or visual targets, unless a saccade is made to the cued location. We suggest that these previous discrepancies may depend on whether attention is reoriented centrally following the peripheral sound. We presented spatially uninformative peripheral auditory cues prior to visual targets requiring speeded detection responses. IOR was found in the absence of eye movements, provided an auditory reorienting event was presented at central fixation between onset of the peripheral cue and the subsequent target, but not when the central reorienting event was visual. A subsequent experiment demonstrated that auditory IOR between successive targets is similarly significantly reduced in the absence of an appropriate central reorienting event. These results imply that auditory stimuli can induce IOR directly. Previous failures to demonstrate IOR following auditory cues may have been due to an opposing influence of long-lasting attentional facilitation at the cued location, rather than to the putative inability of auditory stimuli to engage oculomotor processes generating IOR.