Orienting Attention to Points in Time Improves Stimulus Processing Both within and across Modalities

Abstract

Spatial attention affects the processing of stimuli of both a task-relevant and a task-irrelevant modality. The present study investigated if similar cross-modal effects exist when attention is oriented to a point in time. Short (600 msec) and long (1,200 msec) empty intervals, marked by a tactile onset and an auditory or a tactile offset marker, were presented. In each block, the participants had to attend one interval and one modality. Event-related potentials (ERPs) to auditory and tactile offset markers of attended as compared to unattended intervals were characterized by an enhancement of early negative deflections of the auditory and somatosensory ERPs (audition, 100-140 msec; touch, 130-180 msec) when audition or touch was task relevant, respectively. Similar effects were found for auditory stimuli when touch was task relevant. An additional reaction time experiment revealed faster responses to both auditory and tactile stimuli at the attended as compared to the unattended point in time, irrespective of which modality was primary. Both behavioral and ERP data show that attention can be focused on a point in time, which results in a more efficient processing of auditory and tactile stimuli. The ERP data further suggest that a relative enhancement at perceptual processing stages contributes to the processing advantage for temporally attended stimuli. The existence of cross-modal effects of temporal attention underlines the importance of time as a feature for binding input across different modalities.

Temporally selective attention modulates early perceptual processing: Event-related potential evidence

“…The latency of these effects is similar to what was reported previously for auditory stimuli (100-140 msec in Lange & Röder, 2006;Lange et al, 2003) and for the interaction of temporal and spatial expectancies on visual processing (110-130 msec in Doherty, Rao, Mesulam, & Nobre, 2005). These effects also fall into the same range as typical auditory spatially selective attention effects in studies with a similar design (e.g., Hansen & Hillyard, 1980;Hillyard et al, 1973;Hillyard, Woldorff, Mangun, & Hansen, 1987;Näätänen, Teder-Sälejärvi, Alho, & Lavikainen, 1992), suggesting that both spatial and temporal selection criteria can be applied at the same level of auditory processing.…”

“…One example of this distinction has been reported for visual spatial processing; early visual perception sometimes reflects coarse spatial selection, such that all images presented in the same quadrant as a cued location elicit a larger visual P1, whereas only images presented very near cued locations elicit a larger amplitude N2 (Bush, Sanders, & Cave, 2007;Eimer, 1999;Kasai, Morotomi, Katayama, & Kumada, 2003;Shedden & Nordgaard, 2001). Previous studies of temporally selective attention that have reported effects on early perceptual processing Griffin et al, 2002, Experiment 1;Lange & Röder, 2006;Lange et al, 2003) have not distinguished between extremely coarse selection (anything presented before a temporal boundary, rather than anything presented after) and precise temporal selection. In the present article, if early selection had been acting in a before-or-after manner, ERPs elicited by sounds presented at 1,000 msec when listeners were attending to that interval would have been similar to those presented when listeners were attending to the short or to the long interval.…”

“…They reported an enhanced visual P1 for targets presented at the earlier of two intervals when participants were cued (75% valid) to attend to the earlier time. Further, ERP studies of temporally selective attention that use a paradigm more analogous to the Hillyard sustained-attention design (Hillyard, Hink, Schwent, & Picton, 1973) conclusively demonstrated that temporal attention affects early perceptual processing in the auditory modality (Lange & Röder, 2006;Lange, Rösler, & Röder, 2003). In these studies, listeners were instructed to attend to one of two times following an auditory cue in order to detect rare, louder targets presented at the attended time only.…”

The influence of synchronous audiovisual distractors on audiovisual temporal order judgments

“…Consequently, the participants would have had no strategic reason to direct their attention to a particular point in the stimulus stream in advance. Previous research has shown that target discrimination performance can improve when targets appear at an expected point in time as compared with when they appear at an unexpected point in time (see, e.g., Correa, Sanabria, Spence, Tudela, & Lupiáñez, 2006;Lange & Röder, 2006;Nobre, 2001). Indeed, the fact that performance in Experiment 1 improved when the audiovisual target stimuli were presented at the end of the distractor stream, as compared with when they appeared at the two middle positions, may reflect the fact that participants, after having been presented with three synchronous distractors beforehand, were able to infer that the target would be in the last position and thus direct their attention temporally (Barnes & Jones, 2000;Riess-Jones, 2001).…”

Dopamine modulates attentional control of auditory perception: DARPP-32 (PPP1R1B) genotype effects on behavior and cortical evoked potentials

“…The amplitude of early cortical evoked potentials, such as the N1 component, has been shown to be associated with attentional enhancement of early sensory selection of auditory inputs from the attended locations or channels (e.g., Hansen & Hillyard, 1980;Hillyard et al, 1973) or inputs that appeared in the attended temporal intervals (e.g., Astheimer & Sanders, 2009;Lange et al, 2003;Lange & Röder,. 2006;Sanders & Astheimer, 2008).…”