ISSN 0439-755X
CN 11-1911/B

Acta Psychologica Sinica ›› 2020, Vol. 52 ›› Issue (7): 835-846.doi: 10.3724/SP.J.1041.2020.00835

• Reports of Empirical Studies • Previous Articles     Next Articles

The influence of endogenous spatial cue validity on audiovisual integration

TANG Xiaoyu1(), WU Yingnan1, PENG Xing2, WANG Aijun3(), LI Qi4   

  1. 1 School of Psychology, Liaoning Collaborative Innovation Center of Children and Adolescents Healthy Personality Assessment and Cultivation, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian 116029, China
    2 Flight Technology College, Civil Aviation Flight University of China, Guanghan 618307, China
    3 Department of Psychology, Research Center for Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Soochow University, Suzhou 215123, China
    4 School of Computer Science and Technology, Changchun University of Science and Technology, Changchun 130022, China
  • Received:2019-11-15 Published:2020-07-25 Online:2020-05-25
  • Contact: TANG Xiaoyu,WANG Aijun E-mail:tangyu-2006@163.com;ajwang@suda.edu.cn
  • Supported by:
    National Natural Science Foundation of China(31600882);National Natural Science Foundation of China(31700939);National Natural Science Foundation of China(61773076);high level innovation team training project of Liaoning Provincial Department of Education(2018LNGXGJWPY-yb015)

Abstract:

Previous studies usually used the instruction to control the attention of the participants to different spatial locations to investigate the influence of endogenous spatial attention on the audiovisual integration, which found that endogenous spatial attention enhanced audiovisual integration. However, in reality, it is difficult to assign attention in an all-or-none manner. In present study, we used endogenous spatial cue-target paradigm to investigate the effect of endogenous spatial cue validity on audiovisual integration.

The current study was a 2 (cue validities: valid, invalid) × 3 (target modalities: visual, auditory, audiovisual) factorial design. A total of 62 undergraduate students were recruited as paid volunteers. Experiment 1 recruited 35 participants (5 males; age range: 18~26 years; mean age: 21.26 ± 1.77 years). Experiment 2 recruited 27 participants (6 males; age range: 19~25 years; mean age: 22.19 ± 1.75 years). The visual (V) target was a white pentagonal asterisk block (2°×2°). The auditory (A) target was a 1600 Hz sinusoidal tone presented by speakers. The audiovisual (AV) target was composed by the simultaneous presentation of both the visual and the auditory stimuli. At the beginning of each trial, the fixation stimulus was presented for 600~800 ms in the center of the monitor. Following the fixation stimulus, the cue was presented for 200 ms, which could predict (50% or 80%) the location of the target. Before the target that appeared for 100 ms, the inter stimulus interval (ISI) lasted for 700 ms. The target (A, V, or AV) randomly appeared for 100 ms in the left or right locations. At last, the fixation stimuli appeared for 600 ms to wait for the correspondence responses to targets. During the experiment, the participants were asked to locate targets by pressing buttons (F/J) as quickly and accurately as possible.

The results showed that the responses to AV targets were faster than V or A targets, indicating the appearance of the bimodal advancement effect in both experiments. Each target modality showed significant cueing effect. And the cueing effect in Experiment 2 was significantly larger than the cueing effect in Experiment 1. In addition, in Experiment 1, relative multisensory response enhancement (rMRE) and race model (probability difference) showed no significant difference at valid compared to invalid locations. However, in Experiment 2, rMRE and race model (probability difference) increased at valid compared to invalid locations. The results suggested that endogenous spatial attention enhanced audiovisual integration in high spatial validity condition.

In summary, endogenous spatial attention had different effects on the audiovisual integration under different spatial cue validity. High spatial cue validity enhanced audiovisual integration. The current study provided direct behavioral evidence for endogenous spatial attention to enhance audiovisual integration.

Key words: cue validity, audiovisual integration, endogenous spatial attention, cue-target paradigm, race model