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Abstract:
We report a series of 3 experiments designed to investigate
crossmodal links in endogenous spatial attention between audition
and touch, using the orthogonal spatial cuing paradigm developed by
Spence and Driver (1996). Participants discriminated the elevation
(up versus down) of auditory or tactile targets, regardless of
their laterality or modality. Experiment 1 demonstrated that when
people were informed that targets were more likely on one side,
elevation judgments were faster on that side in both audition and
touch, even if target modality was uncertain. However, it was
possible to 'split' auditory and tactile attention when targets in
the two modalities were expected on constant but opposite sides
throughout a block. Experiment 2 demonstrated that people could
shift attention around independently in either audition or touch
when targets are expected on a particular side in just one
modality. A final study with crossed hands suggests that
audiotactile links in spatial attention apply to common external
locations, rather than simply being determined by which hemisphere
information initially projects to. These results will be contrasted
with previous findings regarding audiovisual (Spence & Driver,
1996) and visuotactile (Spence et al., submitted) links in
attention.
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