Abstract:

The interaction between exogenous attention and multisensory integration is a complex and controversial topic, which has been debated for a long time. In order to explain the interaction mechanism between them, here we summarized two parts based on previous researches. First, exogenous attention can modulate multisensory integration in a bottom-up manner, including three hypotheses as spatial uncertainty, sensory sensitivity and the differences in unimodal signal strength. Second, multisensory integration can also modulate exogenous attention. On one hand, stimuli from multiple sense modalities can be automatically integrated in a bottom-up manner. The integrated multisensory events can capture attention more efficiently compared to unimodal events, even under quite complex circumstances. On the other hand, integrated multisensory events exert top-down control on attentional capture via multisensory signal templates that are stored in the brain.

Key words: multisensory integration, exogenous attention, top-down, bottom-up, endogenous attention