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Related Experiment Videos

Separate attentional resources for vision and audition.

David Alais1, Concetta Morrone, David Burr

  • 1Istituto di Neuroscience del CNR, Via Moruzzi 1, Pisa 56100, Italy. alaisd@physiol.usyd.edu.au

Proceedings. Biological Sciences
|June 17, 2006
PubMed
Summary

Current attention models suggest shared resources limit vision and audition. This study found separate attentional control for visual and auditory tasks, challenging existing theories of attention.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Neuroscience
  • Sensory Perception

Background:

  • Current models of attention posit a shared attentional resource across sensory modalities.
  • This implies concurrent visual and auditory tasks should interfere with performance.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether a common attentional resource limits vision and audition.
  • To test for cross-modal interference between visual and auditory tasks.

Main Methods:

  • Participants performed auditory (pitch discrimination) and visual (contrast discrimination) tasks.
  • Dual-task performance was measured with concurrent cross-modal and intra-modal secondary tasks.

Main Results:

  • No significant interference was observed between concurrent visual and auditory discrimination tasks.

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  • Performance on intra-modal tasks showed significant decrements, with thresholds raised by factors of 2-4.
  • Visual contrast discrimination was unaffected by auditory pitch tasks, and vice versa.

    • Conclusions:

    • Low-level sensory discrimination tasks (pitch, contrast) are likely controlled by separate attentional resources within each modality.
    • Findings challenge the notion of a single, supramodal attentional resource for basic sensory processing.
    • Results have implications for attention theories and the design of multi-sensory information systems.