Toward Neuroergonomic Attention Assistance: Neural Signatures of Haptic-Driven Modulations in Multimodal Cueing

Behavioral data suggest that cognitive performance in demanding environments benefits from multisensory cueing. When primary sensory channels are taxed, supplementary information from other sensory channels can provide additional cues that help maintain spatial attention toward task-relevant locations and may convey complementary spatial information. The goal of this study is to identify objective criteria that support this theory and improve our understanding of optimized stimulus presentation. A multimodal cueing experiment was conducted to compare different combinations of modalities by means of performance measures and several markers of neural sensor data derived from 64-channel EEG recordings. Visual-haptic cued events show the fastest reaction times and lower error rates to a subsequently performed visual discrimination task. It was possible to correlate those results with stronger frontal-midline theta activation and modulated responses in posterior parietal networks during cueing followed by larger P300 components during a visual discrimination task. This work provides insight into multisensory integration during cueing and demonstrates modality-specific effects of haptic involvement that may support the design of efficient information transfer in demanding environments.