title: The effects of selective and divided attention on sensory precision and integration.
abstract: In our daily lives, our capacity to selectively attend to stimuli within or across sensory modalities enables enhanced perception of the surrounding world. While previous research on selective attention has studied this phenomenon extensively, two important questions still remain unanswered: (1) how selective attention to a single modality impacts sensory integration processes, and (2) the mechanism by which selective attention improves perception. We explored how selective attention impacts performance in both a spatial task and a temporal numerosity judgment task, and employed a Bayesian Causal Inference model to investigate the computational mechanism(s) impacted by selective attention. We report three findings: (1) in the spatial domain, selective attention improves precision of the visual sensory representations (which were relatively precise), but not the auditory sensory representations (which were fairly noisy); (2) in the temporal domain, selective attention improves the sensory precision in both modalities (both of which were fairly reliable to begin with); (3) in both tasks, selective attention did not exert a significant influence over the tendency to integrate sensory stimuli. Therefore, it may be postulated that a sensory modality must possess a certain inherent degree of encoding precision in order to benefit from selective attention. It also appears that in certain basic perceptual tasks, the tendency to integrate crossmodal signals does not depend significantly on selective attention. We conclude with a discussion of how these results relate to recent theoretical considerations of selective attention.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of California-Los Angeles, 1285 Franz Hall, Box 951563, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1563, United States. Electronic address: odegaard.brian@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Brian
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Odegaard
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of California-Los Angeles, 1285 Franz Hall, Box 951563, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1563, United States.
authors.forename: David R
authors.initials: DR
authors.lastname: Wozny
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of California-Los Angeles, 1285 Franz Hall, Box 951563, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1563, United States; Department of BioEngineering, University of California-Los Angeles, 420 Westwood Plaza, 5121 Engineering V, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1600, United States; Neuroscience Interdepartmental Program, University of California-Los Angeles, 1502 Gonda (Goldschmied) Neuroscience and Genetics Research Center, 695 Charles Young Drive South, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1761, United States.
authors.forename: Ladan
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Shams
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D001288:Attention; D001307:Auditory Perception; D006801:Humans; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D014796:Visual Perception
keywords: Bayesian Causal Inference; Bisensory attention; Multisensory integration; Selective attention; Unisensory attention