Common principles underlie the fluctuation of auditory and visual sustained attention.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove)
; 74(4): 705-715, 2021 Apr.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-33103992
ABSTRACT
Sustained attention plays an important role in adaptive behaviours in everyday activities. As previous studies have mostly focused on vision, and attentional resources have been thought to be specific to sensory modalities, it is still unclear how mechanisms of attentional fluctuations overlap between visual and auditory modalities. To reduce the effects of sudden stimulus onsets, we developed a new gradual-onset continuous performance task (gradCPT) in the auditory domain and compared dynamic fluctuation of sustained attention in vision and audition. In the auditory gradCPT, participants were instructed to listen to a stream of narrations and judge the gender of each narration. In the visual gradCPT, they were asked to observe a stream of scenery images and indicate whether the scene was a city or mountain. Our within-individual comparison revealed that auditory and visual attention are similar in terms of the false alarm rate and dynamic properties including fluctuation frequency. Absolute timescales of the fluctuation in the two modalities were comparable, notwithstanding the difference in stimulus onset asynchrony. The results suggest that fluctuations of visual and auditory attention are underpinned by common principles and support models with a more central, modality-general controller.
Key words
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
Auditory Perception
Limits:
Humans
Language:
En
Journal:
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove)
Journal subject:
PSICOFISIOLOGIA
/
PSICOLOGIA
Year:
2021
Document type:
Article
Affiliation country:
Japan