The Multisensory Nature of Object-Based Attention
Multiple Paper Presentation

Sophie Molholm
Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research

     Abstract ID Number: 104
     Last modified: May 28, 2007

Abstract
Within the visual modality, it has been shown that attention to a single visual feature of an object such as speed of motion, results in an automatic transfer of attention to other task-irrelevant features (e.g. color). An extension of this logic might lead one to predict that such mechanisms also operate across sensory systems. But, connectivity patterns between feature modules across sensory systems are thought to be sparser to those within a given sensory system, where inter-areal connectivity is extensive. It is not clear that transfer of attention between sensory systems will operate as it does within a sensory system. Here I will discuss electrophysiological evidence that attention to objects is multisensory, with automatic transfer of attention to the unattended features of a multisensory object. Further, I will present data suggesting that transfer of attention from visual-to-auditory features operates in a fundamentally different manner than transfer from auditory-to-visual features. These data will be discussed in terms of “priming” versus “spreading” accounts of attentional transfer.

To be Presented at the Following Symposium:
Multisensory integration: Evidence from human and non-human primate studies
Other papers in this Symposium:

• John J. Foxe
  City College of New York
  Probability-based multisensory object formation: Rethinking cortical principles of sensory integration.
• Arnaud Falchier
  Nathan Kline Institute
  Anatomical networks and physiological mechanisms of multisensory integration in macaque auditory cortex