Audiovisual Modulation of Attention Towards Fearful Stimuli

Abstract

Earlier research has shown that, in a dot-probe experiment, simultaneously presented vocal utterances (one with emotional prosody, one neutral) showed faster responses to probes replacing the location of emotional prosody, indicating a cross-modal modulation of attention (Brosch et al, 2008). We designed a multimodal dot-probe experiment in which: (a) fearful and neutral face pairs were simultaneously accompanied by fearful and neutral paired vocalisations or (b) the fearful and neutral vocalisations without face pictures preceded a visual target probe. A unimodal visual block was run as a control. In addition to the expected visual-only effect, we found spatial attentional bias towards fearful vocalisations followed by a visual probe, replicating the crossmodal modulation of attention shown in the Brosch et al experiment. However, no such effects were found for audiovisual face-voice pairs. This absence of an audiovisual effect with simultaneous face-voice presentation might be the consequence of the double-conflict situation; the fuzziness of two competing stimulus presentations might have ruled out or cancelled potential attentional biases towards fearful auditory and visual information.