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Cross-modal decoupling in temporal attention

Prior studies have repeatedly reported behavioural benefits to events occurring at attended, compared to unattended, points in time. It has been suggested that, as for spatial orienting, temporal orienting of attention spreads across sensory modalities in a synergistic fashion. However, the conseque...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The European journal of neuroscience 2014-06, Vol.39 (12), p.2089-2097
Main Authors: Mühlberg, Stefanie, Oriolo, Giovanni, Soto-Faraco, Salvador
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:Prior studies have repeatedly reported behavioural benefits to events occurring at attended, compared to unattended, points in time. It has been suggested that, as for spatial orienting, temporal orienting of attention spreads across sensory modalities in a synergistic fashion. However, the consequences of cross‐modal temporal orienting of attention remain poorly understood. One challenge is that the passage of time leads to an increase in event predictability throughout a trial, thus making it difficult to interpret possible effects (or lack thereof). Here we used a design that avoids complete temporal predictability to investigate whether attending to a sensory modality (vision or touch) at a point in time confers beneficial access to events in the other, non‐attended, sensory modality (touch or vision, respectively). In contrast to previous studies and to what happens with spatial attention, we found that events in one (unattended) modality do not automatically benefit from happening at the time point when another modality is expected. Instead, it seems that attention can be deployed in time with relative independence for different sensory modalities. Based on these findings, we argue that temporal orienting of attention can be cross‐modally decoupled in order to flexibly react according to the environmental demands, and that the efficiency of this selective decoupling unfolds in time. Orienting spatial attention in one modality causes shifts of attention in other modalities. The present study addresses whether the deployment of attention in time is subject to similar cross‐modal synergies. We found that, unlike spatial attention, attending to a modality at a point in time does not automatically create expectation in another modality. Instead, temporal attention seems to be deployed with relative independence for different sensory modalities.
ISSN:0953-816X
1460-9568
DOI:10.1111/ejn.12563