Separate attentional resources for vision and audition

Author:

Alais David1,Morrone Concetta12,Burr David13

Affiliation:

1. Istituto di Neuroscience del CNRVia Moruzzi 1, Pisa 56100, Italy

2. Facoltà di Psicologia, Università Vita-Salute San RaffaeleVia Olgettina 58, 20132 Milano, Italy

3. Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università degli Studi di FirenzeVia San Nicolò 89, 50125 Firenze, Italy

Abstract

Current models of attention, typically claim that vision and audition are limited by a common attentional resource which means that visual performance should be adversely affected by a concurrent auditory task and vice versa. Here, we test this implication by measuring auditory (pitch) and visual (contrast) thresholds in conjunction with cross-modal secondary tasks and find that no such interference occurs. Visual contrast discrimination thresholds were unaffected by a concurrent chord or pitch discrimination, and pitch-discrimination thresholds were virtually unaffected by a concurrent visual search or contrast discrimination task. However, if the dual tasks were presented within the same modality, thresholds were raised by a factor of between two (for visual discrimination) and four (for auditory discrimination). These results suggest that at least for low-level tasks such as discriminations of pitch and contrast, each sensory modality is under separate attentional control, rather than being limited by a supramodal attentional resource. This has implications for current theories of attention as well as for the use of multi-sensory media for efficient informational transmission.

Publisher

The Royal Society

Subject

General Agricultural and Biological Sciences,General Environmental Science,General Immunology and Microbiology,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology,General Medicine

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