Independent effects of bottom-up temporal expectancy and top-down spatial attention. An audiovisual study using rhythmic cueing.

eJones, Alexander · 2015 · DOAJ

DOI: 10.3389/fnint.2014.00096

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Summary

This study investigates the interaction between top-down spatial attention and bottom-up temporal expectancy, specifically examining whether rhythmic cueing influences perception independently of voluntary spatial orienting. While spatial attention and temporal expectations have been shown to independently enhance perception, it remained unclear how they interact, particularly when temporal expectations are generated automatically by environmental rhythms rather than voluntary instruction. The research aimed to determine if these two processes are dependent or independent mechanisms and whether rhythmic entrainment operates across sensory modalities. The experimental design utilized four separate tasks involving 64 participants: visual cue-visual target (VV), auditory cue-auditory target (AA), auditory cue-visual target (AV), and visual cue-auditory target (VA). Participants performed a Posner cueing task where an informative cue (color or pitch) directed covert spatial attention to the left or right. Crucially, the cue consisted of a rhythm of four or five stimuli, and the target was presented in sync, early, or late relative to this rhythm. The timing of the target relative to the rhythm was not task-relevant, ensuring that temporal expectancy was driven by the stimulus rhythm rather than voluntary strategy. Response times were measured as the primary dependent variable. Results demonstrated that participants responded significantly faster to targets at attended locations compared to unattended locations across all tasks, confirming the efficacy of spatial attention. Furthermore, rhythmic cueing affected response times in both unimodal and crossmodal conditions. In the crossmodal tasks (AV and VA), responses were faster for targets presented in sync or late compared to early targets, indicating that rhythmic stimuli in one modality automatically influenced temporal expectancy in the other. In the unimodal visual task, late targets elicited faster responses than sync or early targets, while the unimodal auditory task showed no significant temporal expectancy effect. Critically, there was no statistical interaction between spatial attention and temporal expectancy in any task. The findings conclude that top-down spatial attention and bottom-up temporal expectancy influence behavior independently, with no evidence of synergistic or interactive effects. The study provides evidence that temporal expectancies created by rhythms are crossmodal, as auditory rhythms influenced visual processing and vice versa. This suggests that neural entrainment to external rhythms occurs automatically and operates separately from voluntary spatial attention mechanisms. These results clarify the distinct roles of spatial and temporal processing in perception, highlighting that while both enhance performance, they do so through independent pathways.

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• multisensory crossmodal