Attention to motion enhances processing of both visual and auditory stimuli: An event-related potential study
Poster

Anton L. Beer
Department of Psychology, Philipps-University Marburg

Brigitte Röder
Department of Psychology, Philipps-University Marburg

     Abstract ID Number: 92
     Full text: Not available
     Last modified: May 22, 2003

Abstract
The present event-related potential (ERP) study investigated whether endogenous attention to motion enhances the processing of sounds in a similar manner as attention to motion facilitates visual perception. It was of particular interest whether top-down processes on auditory motion operate on early (modality-specific) or on late (multimodal) stages of processing. Participants perceived horizontally moving visual and auditory stimuli. They had to respond to infrequent deviant stimuli in one modality that moved in a specified direction. The attended target modality and target direction were alternated across experimental blocks. Both visual and auditory ERPs to stimuli moving in the attended direction were more negative than ERPs to stimuli moving in the unattended direction. This selection negativity (SN) started around 130 ms after stimulus onset for visual and around 100 ms for auditory stimuli. The early part of the auditory SN was distributed frontally, whereas early parts of the visual SN had a parieto-occipital scalp distribution supporting a modality specific account of attention to motion. Later parts of the SN were maximal at centro-parietal electrodes for both modalities. Crossmodal effects of attention to motion could not be detected. The results are discussed with regard to hierarchical models of feature selection.