Auditory spatial attention is encoded in a retinotopic reference frame across eye-movements

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Science
• Auditory Perception

Background:

• Visual information is remapped in retinotopic coordinates across eye movements (saccades).
• The remapping of head-centered auditory information across saccades remains unclear.
• Accurate sound source localization requires multi-modal reference frame transformations during saccades.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how auditory spatial information is remapped across saccades.
• To determine if auditory attention is updated to retinotopic coordinates immediately after saccades.
• To provide behavioral evidence for auditory and cross-modal transsaccadic updating of spatial attention.

Main Methods:

• Participants attended to auditory or visual cues before executing a saccade.
• Auditory or visual targets were presented at prior retinotopic or uncued locations post-saccade.
• Reaction times to targets were measured to assess spatial attention updating.

Main Results:

• Faster reaction times were observed for both auditory and visual targets at prior retinotopic locations.
• Spatial attention from auditory cues is available in retinotopic coordinates immediately after saccades.
• Evidence for asymmetric cross-modal facilitation of retinotopic information was found.

Conclusions:

• The brain efficiently updates auditory spatial attention to retinotopic coordinates during saccades.
• This study provides the first behavioral evidence for immediate auditory and cross-modal transsaccadic updating of spatial attention.
• These findings demonstrate effective neural solutions for sensory localization in dynamic contexts.