Involuntary Listening Aids Seeing: Evidence From Human Electrophysiology
通过记录事件相关电位，发现非自愿地将空间注意力转向无关声音会调节后续视觉目标的脑电反应，表明听觉和视觉的非自愿空间注意涉及共享的脑机制。
It is well known that sensory events of one modality can influence judgments of sensory events in other modalities. For example, people respond more quickly to a target appearing at the location of a previous cue than to a target appearing at another location, even when the two stimuli are from different modalities. Such cross-modal interactions suggest that involuntary spatial attention mechanisms are not entirely modality-specific. In the present study, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded to elucidate the neural basis and timing of involuntary, cross-modal spatial attention effects. We found that orienting spatial attention to an irrelevant sound modulates the ERP to a subsequent visual target over modality-specific, extrastriate visual cortex, but only after the initial stages of sensory processing are completed. These findings are consistent with the proposal that involuntary spatial attention orienting to auditory and visual stimuli involves shared, or at least linked, brain mechanisms.