title: Influence of auditory spatial attention on cross-modal semantic priming effect: evidence from N400 effect.
abstract: Semantic priming is an important research topic in the field of cognitive neuroscience. Previous studies have shown that the uni-modal semantic priming effect can be modulated by attention. However, the influence of attention on cross-modal semantic priming is unclear. To investigate this issue, the present study combined a cross-modal semantic priming paradigm with an auditory spatial attention paradigm, presenting the visual pictures as the prime stimuli and the semantically related or unrelated sounds as the target stimuli. Event-related potentials results showed that when the target sound was attended to, the N400 effect was evoked. The N400 effect was also observed when the target sound was not attended to, demonstrating that the cross-modal semantic priming effect persists even though the target stimulus is not focused on. Further analyses revealed that the N400 effect evoked by the unattended sound was significantly lower than the effect evoked by the attended sound. This contrast provides new evidence that the cross-modal semantic priming effect can be modulated by attention.
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Technology, Tianjin Key Laboratory of Cognitive Computing and Application, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300350, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Hongyan
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Technology, Tianjin Key Laboratory of Cognitive Computing and Application, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300350, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Gaoyan
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Technology, Tianjin Key Laboratory of Cognitive Computing and Application, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300350, People's Republic of China. liubaolin@tsinghua.edu.cn.|State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Technology and Systems, National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, People's Republic of China. liubaolin@tsinghua.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Baolin
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Liu
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D005071:Evoked Potentials / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007266:Inhibition, Psychological; D008297:Male; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012660:Semantics; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Auditory spatial attention; Cross-modal; ERPs; N400 effect; Semantic priming effect