Visual-haptic cue weighting is independent of modality-specific attention.

By Hannah B. Helbig, Marc O. Ernst. 2008

97 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Some object properties (e.g., size, shape, and depth information) are perceived through multiple sensory modalities. Such redundant sensory information is integrated into a unified percept. The integrated estimate is a weighted average of the sensory estimates, where higher weight is attributed to the more reliable sensory signal. Here we examine whether modality-specific attention can affect multisensory integration. Selectively reducing attention in one sensory channel can reduce the relative reliability of the estimate derived from this channel and might thus alter the weighting of the sensory estimates. In the present study, observers performed unimodal (visual and haptic) and bimodal (visual-haptic) size discrimination tasks. They either performed the primary task alone or they performed a secondary task simultaneously (dual task). The secondary task consisted of a same/different judgment of rapidly presented visual letter sequences, and so might be expected to withdraw attention predominantly from the visual rather than the haptic channel. Comparing size discrimination performance in single- and dual-task conditions, we found that vision-based estimates were more affected by the secondary task than the haptics-based estimates, indicating that indeed attention to vision was more reduced than attention to haptics. This attentional manipulation, however, did not affect the cue weighting in the bimodal task. Bimodal discrimination performance was better than unimodal performance in both single- and dual-task conditions, indicating that observers still integrate visual and haptic size information in the dual-task condition, when attention is withdrawn from vision. These findings indicate that visual-haptic cue weighting is independent of modality-specific attention.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Assessing the Role of the ‘Unity Assumption’ on Multisensory Integration: A Review (2017, positive): “Other studies have manipulated the participants’ attentional resources using a single vs. dual tasking manipulation, and the results demonstrated the participants’ performance remained statistically optimal in both conditions (Helbig and Ernst, 2008; Vercillo and Gori, 2015; Wahn and König, 2016).”
The Curious Incident of Attention in Multisensory Integration: Bottom-up vs. Top-down (2016, unknown): “Thus, modality-specific attention was shown to alter the sensory weights in audio-visual integration (Vercillo and Gori, 2015 but see Helbig and Ernst, 2008).”
Attentional Resource Allocation in Visuotactile Processing Depends on the Task, But Optimal Visuotactile Integration Does Not Depend on Attentional Resources (2016, methodology): “However, given that a visual search task also involves a discriminative component, there is reason to believe that a visual search task and a tactile or auditory spatial task should not interfere with each other (Alais et al., 2006).”
Attention to sound improves auditory reliability in audio-tactile spatial optimal integration (2015, methodology): “Our study appears to be in conflict with previous results from Helbig and Ernst (2008) that have recently examined the effect of a dual visual task on visuo-tactile integration.”