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Updated: Jul 14, 2026
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Measurement of Neurophysiological Signals of Ignoring and Attending Processes in Attention Control
Published on: July 5, 2015
Attentional orienting across the sensory modalities.
Durk Talsma1, Albert Kok, Heleen A Slagter
1Cognitive Psychology Department, Vrije Universiteit, Van den Boechorststraat 1, 1081BT Amsterdam, The Netherlands. d.talsma@psy.vu.nl
Brain and Cognition
|June 8, 2007
Summary
Attentional control mechanisms are influenced by cue modality, with visual cues showing earlier effects. These findings reveal modality-specific processing in attention deployment and cue congruency effects.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Psychology
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Attentional control mechanisms bias sensory systems to prioritize specific stimuli.
- Understanding modality-specific attentional control is crucial for explaining sensory processing.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how cue-target modality incongruence impacts attentional control.
- To determine the extent to which top-down attentional control is generalized across information types.
Main Methods:
- Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded.
- Participants attended to visual (color) or auditory (pitch) targets cued by visual or auditory words.
- Cue-target modality congruency was manipulated.
Main Results:
- Cue congruency effects emerged within 200 ms post-cue over frontal scalp regions.
- Both visual and auditory attention deployment involved dorsal posterior positivity followed by fronto-central negativity.
- Fronto-central negativity was earlier and more pronounced for cued visual modality.
Conclusions:
- Attentional deployment mechanisms are partly determined by the modality of attention (visual or auditory).
- Cue congruency influences these attentional mechanisms, suggesting modality-specific processing.
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