| Abstract: | This study investigated nonspatial shifts of attention between visual and auditory modalities. The authors provide evidence that the modality of a stimulus (S?) affected the processing of a subsequent stimulus (S?) depending on whether they shared the same modality. For both vision and audition, the onset of S? summoned attention exogenously to its modality, causing a delay in processing S? in a different modality. That undermines the notion that auditory stimuli have a stronger and more automatic alerting effect than visual stimuli (M. I. Posner, M. J. Nissen, & R. M. Klein, 1976). The results are consistent with other recent studies showing cross-modal attentional limitation. The authors suggest that such cross-modal limitation can be produced by simply presenting S? and S? in different modalities and that central processing mechanisms are also, at least partially, modality dependent. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
