In our natural environment, the brain needs to combine signals from multiple sensory modalities into a coherent percept. While spatial attention guides perceptual decisions by prioritizing processing of signals that are task-relevant, spatial expectations encode the probability of signals over space. Previous studies have shown that behavioral effects of spatial attention generalize across sensory modalities. However, because they manipulated spatial attention as signal probability over space, these studies could not dissociate attention and expectation or assess their interaction. In two experiments, we orthogonally manipulated spatial attention (i.e., task-relevance) and expectation (i.e., signal probability) selectively in one sensory modality (i.e., primary modality) (experiment 1: audition, experiment 2: vision) and assessed their effects on primary and secondary sensory modalities in which attention and expectation were held constant. Our results show behavioral effects of spatial attention that are comparable for audition and vision as primary modalities; yet, signal probabilities were learnt more slowly in audition, so that spatial expectations were formed later in audition than vision. Critically, when these differences in learning between audition and vision were accounted for, both spatial attention and expectation affected responses more strongly in the primary modality in which they were manipulated, and generalized to the secondary modality only in an attenuated fashion. Collectively, our results suggest that both spatial attention and expectation rely on modality-specific and multisensory mechanisms.

中文翻译：

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特定形式和多感官机制的空间注意和期望

在我们的自然环境中，大脑需要将来自多种感觉模式的信号组合成一个连贯的感知。空间注意力通过优先处理与任务相关的信号来指导感知决策，而空间期望值则编码信号在空间上的概率。先前的研究表明，空间注意力的行为效应在各种感觉模态中普遍存在。但是，由于他们将空间注意力作为空间上的信号概率进行操纵，因此这些研究无法分散注意力和期望，也无法评估其相互作用。在两个实验中，我们在一种感觉方式（即主要方式）中选择性地正交处理了空间注意力（即任务相关性）和期望（即信号概率）（实验1：试听，实验2：视觉），并评估了它们对保持注意力和期望不变的主要和次要感觉方式的影响。我们的研究结果表明，空间注意力的行为效应在听觉和视觉方面可比拟为主要方式。但是，信号概率在试听中学习的速度较慢，因此空间期望在试听中的形成要比视觉晚。至关重要的是，当解释了听觉和视觉之间在学习上的这些差异时，空间注意力和期望在操作它们的主要方式中对反应的影响更大，并且仅以衰减的方式推广到次要方式。总体而言，我们的结果表明，空间注意力和期望都依赖于特定于情态的方式和多感官机制。