| dc.description.abstract |
<p>At every moment in life we are receiving input from multiple sensory modalities.
We are limited, however, in the amount of information we can selectively attend to
and fully process at any one time. The ability to integrate the relevant corresponding
multisensory inputs together and to segregate other sensory information that is conflicting
or distracting is therefore fundamental to our ability to successfully navigate through
our complex environment. Such multisensory integration and segregation is done on
the basis of temporal, spatial, and semantic cues, often aided by selective attention
to particular inputs from one or multiple modalities. The precise nature of how attention
interacts with multisensory perception, and how this ramifies behaviorally and neurally,
has been largely underexplored. Here, in a series of six cognitive experiments in
humans using auditory and visual stimuli, along with electroencephalography (EEG)
measures of brain activity and behavioral measures of task performance, I examine
the interactions between attention, stimulus conflict, and multisensory processing.
I demonstrate that attention can spread across modalities in a pattern that closely
follows the temporal linking of multisensory stimuli, while also engendering the spatial
linking of such multisensory stimuli. When stimulus inputs either within audition
or across modalities conflict, I observe an electrophysiological signature of the
processing of this conflict that is similar to what had been previously observed within
the visual modality. Moreover, using neural measures of attentional distraction, I
show that when task-irrelevant stimulus input from one modality conflicts with task-relevant
input from another, attention is initially pulled toward the conflicting irrelevant
modality, thereby contributing to the observed impairment in task performance. Finally,
I demonstrate that there are individual differences in multisensory temporal processing
in the population, in particular between those with extensive action-video-game experience
versus those with little. However, everyone appears to be susceptible to multisensory
distraction, a finding that should be taken into serious consideration in today's
complex world of multitasking.</p>
|
|
