A matter of attention: Crossmodal congruence enhances and impairs performance in a novel trimodal matching paradigm

Abstract

A novel crossmodal matching paradigm including vision, audition, and somatosensation was developed in order to investigate the interaction between attention and crossmodal congruence in multisensory integration. To that end, all three modalities were stimulated concurrently while a bimodal focus was defined blockwise. Congruence between stimulus intensity changes in the attended modalities had to be evaluated. We found that crossmodal congruence improved performance if both, the attended modalities and the task-irrelevant distractor were congruent. If the attended modalities were incongruent, the distractor impaired performance due to its congruence relation to one of the attended modalities. Between attentional conditions, magnitudes of crossmodal enhancement or impairment differed. Largest crossmodal effects were seen in visual-tactile matching, intermediate effects for audio-visual and smallest effects for audio-tactile matching. We conclude that differences in crossmodal matching likely reflect characteristics of multisensory neural network architecture. We discuss our results with respect to the timing of perceptual processing and state hypotheses for future physiological studies. Finally, etiological questions are addressed.

Frontal and parietal alpha oscillations reflect attentional modulation of cross-modal matching

“…This was achieved by estimating detection thresholds for each modality and change direction separately using a psychophysical staircase procedure 29 . Yet, a questionnaire that was completed during debriefing of the preceding behavioural study 16 indicated that subjective salience of the sensory components when presented jointly was in fact not equal, but strongest for the visual component. In particular, participants reported that the visual component was hardest to ignore when it was task irrelevant (Wilcoxon rank sum test, Bonferroni correction; average ranks: V = 1.4, A = 2.3, T = 2.1; V-T: p corr = 0.0074, V-A: p corr = 0.7902, T-A: p corr = 0.7200).…”

“…With respect to stimulus-driven aspects of multisensory perception, a multitude of studies show behaviourally beneficial effects of concurrent and congruent multisensory stimuli 14–16 . While this is well established, underlying mechanisms remain largely elusive 17–19 .…”

“…These findings are well in line with the literature reviewed above. In the present study, we employed an extension of our earlier experimental design now incorporating concurrent trimodal stimulation 16 . That is, we investigated whether the mechanisms outlined above would hold in a situation with strong sensory drive and cross-modal competition.…”

“…Error bars represent standard deviations. ATTENTION as well as CONGRUENCE significantly affected the timing of responses (Note: RTs were collected in our previous behavioural study 16 from the same sample of participants).…”

Crossmodal Congruency Enhances Performance of Healthy Older Adults in Visual-Tactile Pattern Matching

“…However, the sense of touch has been shown to be immensely important in all areas of everyday life (Gallace and Spence, 2014). Furthermore, there is evidence suggesting that tasks involving the interaction of visual and somatosensory stimuli profit strongly from crossmodal interaction effects (Mahoney et al, 2011;Misselhorn et al, 2016). The tactile modality interacts with vision for example in object recognition or the identification of somatosensory stimuli but also in posture control (Tipper et al, 1998;Oie et al, 2002;List et al, 2012;Gallace and Spence, 2014).…”