Interactions between exogenous auditory and visual spatial attention

Six experiments were carried out to investigate the issue of cross-modality between exogenous auditory and visual spatial attention employing Posner's cueing paradigm in detection, localization, and discrimination tasks. Resu lts indicated cueing in detection tasks with visual or auditory cues and vi sual targets but not with auditory targets (Experiment 1). In the localizat ion tasks, cueing was found with both visual and auditory targets. Inhibiti on of return was apparent only in the within-modality conditions (Experimen t 2). This suggests that it is important whether the attention system is ac tivated directly (within a modality) or indirectly (between modalities). In creasing the cue validity from 50% to 80% influenced performance only in th e localization task (Experiment 4). These findings are interpreted as being indicative for modality-specific but interacting attention mechanisms. The results of Experiments 5 and 6 (up/down discrimination tasks) also show cr oss-modal cueing but nor with visual cues and auditory targets. Furthermore , there was no inhibition of return in ang condition. This suggests that so me cueing effects might be task dependent.