Crossmodal links between audition and touch in covert endogenous spatial attention.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Psychology
• Sensory Perception

Background:

• Covert spatial attention is crucial for processing sensory information.
• Crossmodal attention links different sensory modalities, but audiotactile interactions are less understood.
• Investigating audiotactile spatial attention reveals how the brain integrates information across senses.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate crossmodal links in sustained endogenous covert spatial attention between audition and touch.
• To determine if attention can be allocated independently or jointly across auditory and tactile spatial locations.
• To examine the flexibility of audiotactile spatial attention representations, including their adaptation to postural changes.

Main Methods:

• Employed the orthogonal spatial cuing paradigm with auditory and tactile targets.
• Participants performed elevation discrimination (up vs. down) for targets presented to the left or right of fixation.
• Varied cuing conditions to manipulate expectations for target locations across modalities and postures.

Main Results:

• Experiment 1 showed independent spatial attention shifts in audition and touch.
• Experiment 2 demonstrated faster judgments when targets were cued to the same side for both modalities.
• Participants could split attention between modalities (with some cost) when targets were expected on opposite sides, and this held even with altered body posture (Experiment 3).

Conclusions:

• Audiotactile covert spatial attention is flexible, allowing for independent or joint allocation.
• Spatial representations for audiotactile attention are dynamic and update with changes in body posture.
• Findings contribute to understanding crossmodal interactions in attention and spatial awareness.