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Exploring how sensory dominance modulated by modality-specific expectation: an event-related potential study
Xiaoyu Tang1, Dandan Fan1, Xueli Wang2
1School of Psychology, Liaoning Collaborative Innovation Center of Children and Adolescents Healthy Personality Assessment and Cultivation, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian, China.
Expectations influence how we perceive visual stimuli in bimodal audiovisual settings, affecting the Colavita visual dominance effect. This study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to show how directing attention to specific senses impacts visual dominance.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Cognitive Psychology
- Sensory Perception
Background:
- The Colavita visual dominance effect describes preferential responses to visual stimuli in bimodal audiovisual settings.
- Top-down expectation is known to modulate sensory dominance.
- The electrophysiological impact of modality-specific expectations on visual dominance remains unclear.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how modality expectation influences the Colavita visual dominance effect at the electrophysiological level.
- To examine the role of unimodal target probabilities in modulating sensory dominance.
- To identify specific event-related potential (ERP) components associated with expectation-driven sensory dominance.
Main Methods:
- Utilized event-related potential (ERP) measurements to record brain activity.
- Manipulated unimodal target probabilities to create distinct visual and auditory expectation conditions.
- Analyzed behavioral data for the magnitude of the visual dominance effect.
- Examined ERP components (P2, N2, N1) in specific brain regions (central-parietal, frontal).
Main Results:
- Behaviorally, a larger visual dominance effect was observed when visual sensory expectation was prioritized (40% V:10% A).
- Electrophysiologically, increased P2 amplitude (200-250 ms) in the central-parietal region for visual precedence responses (V_A) under visual expectation.
- Distinct N2 (290-330 ms) and N1 (150-170 ms) frontal component modulations were observed under different expectation conditions (auditory vs. visual).
Conclusions:
- Increasing unimodal target probability enhances top-down expectation towards the cued modality.
- Sensory dominance, particularly visual dominance, emerges in later processing phases under specific expectation conditions.
- Electrophysiological markers (P2, N2, N1 amplitudes) reflect the influence of top-down expectations on audiovisual processing and sensory dominance.
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