Endogenous and exogenous control of attention in dichotic listening.
Dichotic listening to verbal stimuli results in a right ear advantage (REA), indicating a left hemisphere processing superiority. The magnitude of the REA can be modulated by instructions to direct attention to the left or right ear stimulus. A previous study from our laboratory showed that presenting a prime syllable before the presentation of the dichotic syllables increases reports of the nonprimed syllable, apparently a negative priming effect that inhibits attention to the distracting prime representation. The present study combined attention instruction and priming, making up a 3 x 3 factorial design. The prime stimulus was a single consonant-vowel syllable presented binaurally just before onset of the dichotic consonant-vowel syllables. Results showed that both instructions and priming manipulations had an effect on which dichotic stimulus was selected. There was also a significant interaction between attention instruction and priming manipulation, indicating that the mechanism for instructed attention and the mechanism for negative priming work on the same level of processing.
Saetrevik
Bjorn
B
Department of Biological and Medical Psychology, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway. bjorn.satrevik@psybp.uib.no
Hugdahl
Kenneth
K
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D004007:Dichotic Listening Tests; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D000091402:Prohibitins