Shifting and focusing auditory spatial attention.

Abstract

Auditory spatial attention was investigated by manipulating spatial and temporal relations between an auditory spatial cue and an auditory target. The principal findings were that performance improved as time available to shift attention to a cued spatial position increased, accurate spatial cues facilitated performance more than inaccurate cues, performance was virtually identical for shifts of attention ranging from 0 degrees and 180 degrees, and performance declined as the distance of an unexpected target from a cued spatial location increased. The experiments provided evidence that auditory attention may be allocated to a specific location in response to an auditory spatial cue and that the time required to shift attention does not appear to depend on the distance of the shift. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the spatial distribution of auditory attention may be described most accurately by a gradient model in which attentional resources decline gradually with distance from a focal point.

Tactile selective attention and body posture: Assessing the multisensory contributions of vision and proprioception

“…The focused attention conditions of Experiment 2 led to shorter average response latencies than did those reported in Experiment 1, suggesting that shifting attention across the body surface to detect target stimuli takes time. This finding is also in accord with previous studies addressing tactile attention shifts across the body surface (e.g., Lakatos & Shepard, 1997) and with the attention-shifting costs found with other sensory modalities (i.e., Mondor & Zatorre, 1995).…”

Auditory attention to frequency and time: an analogy to visual local–global stimuli

“…However, spatial cues affected a pitch discrimination task only when the cue was informative, suggesting a more conscious or endogenous mechanism. This suggests that frequency may be automatically encoded during any auditory attention task, whereas the encoding of auditory spatial information is dependent on the specifics of the experimental procedure (see also Buchtel & Butter, 1988;Mondor & Zatorre, 1995;Rhodes, 1987;Woods, Alain, Diaz, Rhodes, & Ogawa, 2001). To date, this hypothesis has not received unequivocal support, however; Mondor, Zatorre, & Terrio (1998, Experiment 2) found that even when performing a task on an orthogonal dimension, both frequency and location cues influenced performance, even when they were uninformative.…”

Inhibitory processes in auditory selective attention: Evidence of location-based and frequency-based inhibition of return

“…This apparent lack of interest may be unCopyright 1998 Psychonomic Society, Inc.derstandable given that there has been some controversy as to whether it is even possible to allocate auditory attention on the basis of spatial location or other features (e.g., Buchtel & Butter, 1988). However, recent evidence has established quite clearly that auditory attention may be deployed in response not only to a location cue (Mondor & Bryden, 1992a, 1992bMondor & Zatorre, 1995;Spence & Driver, 1994) but also to a frequency cue (Hafter, Schlauch, & Tang, 1993;Mondor & Bregman, 1994;Mondor, Zatorre, & Terrio, in press;Scharf, Quigley, Aoki, Peachey, & Reeves, 1987;Schlauch & Hafter, 1991).…”

“…In different conditions, the cue and the tar-AUDITORY lOR 297 get differed only either in location or in frequency. This manipulation was included both because sound identification might be facilitated by either spatial (Mondor & Zatorre, 1995) or frequency (e.g., Mondor & Bregman, 1994) cues and because Mondor et al (in press) have shown that while location plays a dominant role in guiding visual selection (see, e.g., Tsal & Lavie, 1988, location and frequency appear to be codominant in guiding auditory selection. Given this previous evidence, as well as the evidence that visual lOR may occur on the basis of variation in features other than location (e.g., Tipper et aI., 1991), it would appear reasonable to expect that if there is an inhibitory component to auditory covert orienting, then it should be apparent whether cue and target differ in frequency or location.…”