Temporal cueing improves auditory perception with no evidence for attentional tradeoffs

Temporal cues help us focus attention at just the right moment. Whereas visual temporal attention selectively boosts perception at attended times at a cost to other moments, it remains unclear whether auditory temporal attention operates under the same constraints. To address this question, we designed a two-target temporal cueing task where participants discriminated the frequency sweep direction of one of two successive auditory stimuli, separated by 250 ms, while temporal attention was directed to one or both time points. We found that temporal attention improved auditory discrimination only for the first time point and could then remain sustained across the interval, without evidence of attentional tradeoffs in perceptual discriminability across time. Further, manipulating auditory feature uncertainty changed overall performance but did not modulate the impact of temporal attention or yield tradeoffs. Finally, comparison to previous data from a closely matched visual task confirmed that while temporal attention enhanced perception in both vision and audition, only vision shows tradeoffs at this timescale. Altogether the results suggest that the temporal constraints on attention are modality-dependent.