Modulation of Auditory Spatial Attention by Visual Emotional Cues: Differential Effects of Attentional Engagement and Disengagement for Pleasant and Unpleasant Cues

Harrison, Neil and Woodhouse, Neil (2015) Modulation of Auditory Spatial Attention by Visual Emotional Cues: Differential Effects of Attentional Engagement and Disengagement for Pleasant and Unpleasant Cues. Cognitive Processing. ISSN 1612-4782

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Abstract

Previous research has demonstrated that threatening, compared to neutral pictures, can bias attention towards non-emotional auditory targets. Here we investigated which subcomponents of attention contributed to the influence of emotional stimuli on auditory spatial attention. Participants indicated the location of an auditory target, after brief (250 ms) presentation of a spatially non-predictive peripheral visual cue. Responses to targets were faster at the location of the preceding visual cue, compared to at the opposite location (cue validity effect). The cue validity effect was larger for targets following pleasant and unpleasant cues compared to neutral cues, for right-sided targets. For unpleasant cues, the crossmodal cue validity effect was driven by delayed attentional disengagement, and for pleasant cues it was driven by enhanced engagement. We conclude that both pleasant and unpleasant visual cues influence the distribution of attention across modalities, and that the associated attentional mechanisms depend on the valence of the visual cue.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information and Comments:	“The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10339-016-0749-6”
Keywords:	Crossmodal Attention Emotion Spatial Visual Auditory
Faculty / Department:	Faculty of Human and Digital Sciences > School of Psychology
Depositing User:	Pauline Bray
Date Deposited:	23 Feb 2016 14:19
Last Modified:	24 Feb 2016 10:18
URI:	https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/762

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