ABSTRACT

The majority of studies showing multisensory attention benefits have focused on brief audiovisual events. Here we examined whether attention benefits can occur for auditory and visual signals that change in synchrony over time. In the first two experiments, we found no evidence that attention was captured more by synchronous compared to asynchronous audiovisual and visual looming signals. The results of our third experiment suggested that attention was not preferentially oriented towards synchronous compared to asynchronous audiovisual and visual looming signals. In the fourth experiment, we found no evidence for better sustained attention for synchronous compared to asynchronous audiovisual looming and unisensory signals. Together, these findings indicate that synchronous multisensory looming signals are not always prioritised by our information processing system. Future multisensory research should focus on more conceptual clarity and deepen our understanding of the specific stimulus, task and contextual features affecting the strength and quality of multisensory integration.

摘要

多数研究显示出多感官注意力的好处集中在简短的视听事件上。在这里，我们检查了听觉和视觉信号是否会随时间同步变化而引起注意的好处。在前两个实验中，我们发现没有证据表明与异步视听和视觉迫在眉睫的信号相比，同步能够吸引更多的注意力。我们的第三个实验的结果表明，与异步视听和视觉迫在眉睫的信号相比，注意力并没有优先地偏向于同步。在第四个实验中，我们发现没有证据表明与异步视听设备和单感觉信号相比，对同步设备有更好的持续关注。一起，这些发现表明，我们的信息处理系统并不总是将同步多传感器迫在眉睫的信号放在首位。未来的多感官研究应着重于概念上的清晰度，并加深我们对影响多感官整合的强度和质量的特定刺激，任务和情境特征的理解。