Orienting spatial attention to sounds enhances visual processing

Attention, the mechanism by which information is selected for further processing, has mostly been studied within the visual system. While this research has been exceptionally successful, it is important to understand how attention operates across the sensory modalities. This review focuses on recent studies showing that orienting to a peripheral, salient sound affects visual processing: it enhances visual perception, boosts visual-cortical responses, and modulates visual cortex activity before the appearance of a visual object. Critically, all of these effects are spatially selective, indicating that spatial attention facilitates perceptual processing at an attended location across sensory modalities. The neural changes in visual cortex triggered by the sounds not only resemble some of the neural modulations reported in uni-modal visual attention studies, but also reveal some important differences.