Influences of attention on auditory aftereffects following purely visual adaptation

Recently, Kitagawa and Ichihara (2002) demonstrated that visual adaptation to an expanding or contracting disk produces a cross-modal visually-induced auditory loudness aftereffect (VALAE), which they attributed to cross-correlations of motion in three-dimensional space. Our experiments extend their results by providing evidence that attending selectively to one of two competing visual stimuli of the same saliency produces a cross-modal VALAE that favors the attended stimulus. These cross-modal attentional effects suggest the existence of integrative spatial mechanisms between vision and audition that are affected by attention.