Abstract: The present study investigated cross-modal links for endogenous covert spatial orienting in vision and hearing. By comparing the visual symbolic cues (an arrow at the fixation point indicating a probable peripheral target) with auditory symbolic cues (one of three pure sounds with different pitches), examined the possibility of auditory symbolic cues to activate endogenous visual selective attention, and showed that valid auditory cues come with inhibition rather than facilitation at SOA shorter than 500ms while valid visual cues showed significant facilitation even at the shortest SOA(100ms).At longer SOA, both cues showed facilitation. These results showed that there were indeed separable modality-specific spatial-attention systems, but with links such that auditory orienting tended to result in visual orienting to the corresponding location in visual space, suggesting the "separable but linked" hypothesis.

Key words: selective attention, endogenous, cross-modality