Charles W. Eriksen dedicated much of his research career to the field of cognitive psychology, investigating human information processing in those situations that required selection between competing stimuli. Together with his wife Barbara, he introduced the flanker task, which became one of the standard experimental tasks used by researchers to investigate the mechanisms underpinning selection. Although Eriksen himself was primarily interested in investigating visual selection, the flanker task was eventually adapted by other researchers to investigate human information processing and selection in a variety of nonvisual and multisensory situations. Here, we discuss the core aspects of the flanker task and interpret the evidence of the flanker task when used in crossmodal and multisensory settings. “Selection” has been a core topic of psychology for nearly 120 years. Nowadays, though, it is clear that we need to look at selection from a multisensory perspective—the flanker task, at least in its crossmodal and multisensory variants, is an important tool with which to investigate selection, attention, and multisensory information processing.

查尔斯·埃里克森 (Charles W. Eriksen) 将他的大部分研究生涯奉献给了认知心理学领域，研究需要在竞争刺激之间进行选择的情况下的人类信息处理。他与妻子芭芭拉一起引入了侧翼任务，该任务成为研究人员用来研究支持选择机制的标准实验任务之一。尽管埃里克森本人主要对研究视觉选择感兴趣，但侧翼任务最终被其他研究人员采用，以研究各种非视觉和多感官情况下的人类信息处理和选择。在这里，我们讨论侧卫任务的核心方面，并解释侧卫任务在跨模式和多感官环境中使用时的证据。近120年来，“选择”一直是心理学的核心话题。但如今，很明显我们需要从多感官的角度来看待选择——侧翼任务，至少在其跨模式和多感官变体中，是研究选择、注意力和多感官信息处理的重要工具。