Semantically congruent bimodal presentation modulates cognitive control over attentional guidance by working memory

Cai, Biye; Tang, Xiaoyu; Wang, Aijun; Zhang, Ming · 2024 · Crossref

DOI: 10.3758/s13421-024-01521-y

archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified

Get this paper ↗ (DOI — opens at the source; we link to it, we don't host it)

Summary

This study investigates how semantically congruent bimodal (audiovisual) presentation influences the cognitive control of attentional guidance by working memory. While previous research established that audiovisual enhancement improves working memory and selective attention, its specific impact on memory-driven attentional suppression—where individuals actively ignore distractors matching memory contents—remained unclear. The authors aimed to determine if multisensory encoding facilitates this top-down suppression mechanism and whether this effect is modulated by individual search speed. The researchers employed a dual-task paradigm combining a working memory task with a visual search task. Thirty-five participants were divided into two conditions based on how memory items were presented: visual-only (written color words) or audiovisual (written words paired with congruent verbal sounds). Participants were instructed that the search target would never match the memorized color, encouraging them to suppress attention to memory-matched distractors (invalid trials) compared to trials with no match (neutral trials). To examine the role of cognitive control availability, participants were categorized into "fast" and "slow" search groups based on their reaction times in neutral trials. The study analyzed search accuracy, reaction times, and the temporal dynamics of attentional suppression using vincentized cumulative distributions. The results demonstrated that memory accuracy was significantly higher in the audiovisual condition than in the visual-only condition. Crucially, the audiovisual condition produced a significantly larger and earlier-appearing memory-driven attentional suppression effect. In the audiovisual condition, suppression was evident from the earliest reaction time quantiles, whereas in the visual-only condition, it only emerged later in the distribution. The magnitude of suppression increased over the course of the experiment in the audiovisual condition but remained stable in the visual-only condition. Furthermore, the benefits of audiovisual enhancement were dependent on search speed. The slow search group exhibited robust suppression in both conditions, with the audiovisual condition yielding earlier and stronger effects. In contrast, the fast search group showed suppression only in longer reaction time trials within the visual-only condition, while the audiovisual condition selectively improved the temporal dynamics of suppression for this group. These findings indicate that semantically congruent bimodal presentation progressively facilitates the strength and temporal dynamics of memory-driven attentional suppression. The study suggests that multisensory working memory representations synergize with top-down suppression mechanisms to produce more effective cognitive control. Importantly, the role of audiovisual enhancement is flexible and contingent on search speed, highlighting that the efficiency of memory-driven attention depends on the interplay between sensory representation strength and the availability of cognitive control resources. This work clarifies the mechanisms by which multisensory integration optimizes visual search performance through enhanced top-down guidance.

Provenance

The full processing record for this entry. Every stage of this paper's journey through the pipeline is logged — what ran, with which tool and model, how many attempts it took, and when it last completed.

Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-26; verification: verified.

Topics

Ranked by relevance to this paper. Hover a topic for its definition.

• multisensory crossmodal
• visual search
• attention selective divided