Temporally selective attention modulates early perceptual processing: Event-related potential evidence

Sanders, Lisa D.; Astheimer, L. B. · 2008 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.3758/pp.70.4.732

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Summary

This study investigates whether temporally selective attention can modulate early perceptual processing with high temporal precision. While spatial attention is well-established, the ability to selectively attend to specific time points in rapidly changing streams remains debated, particularly regarding whether such attention affects early sensory stages or only later identification processes. The authors aimed to determine if listeners could flexibly allocate attention to time points differing by as little as 500 milliseconds and whether this modulation occurs at perceptually early stages of auditory processing. To test this, eighteen participants performed an auditory detection task using event-related potentials (ERPs). Listeners were cued to attend to one of three specific time intervals (500, 1,000, or 1,500 milliseconds after a fixation point) to detect a rare "deviant" pure tone amidst frequent "standard" frequency-modulated tones. Crucially, participants only responded to deviants presented at the attended time, ensuring that attention was maintained for specific intervals rather than shifting broadly. EEG data were recorded to analyze early components (P1, N1) and later components (P2, N2, P3). Behavioral results demonstrated that participants could effectively discriminate between the three time intervals, responding significantly more often to deviants at attended times compared to unattended times. ERP analysis of the deviant sounds showed attention effects only on the late P3 component, consistent with target identification processes. However, analysis of the standard sounds—which were physically identical across conditions but never targets—revealed significant attention effects on the early N1 component. Specifically, the N1 amplitude was larger for standards presented at the attended time compared to unattended times for all three intervals. This effect was observed for the 500, 1,000, and 1,500-millisecond intervals, indicating that attention enhanced early perceptual processing precisely at the cued time points. The findings provide evidence that temporally selective attention modulates early perceptual processing in the auditory modality with high temporal precision. Unlike previous studies that suggested attention effects were limited to later stages or coarse temporal windows, this study shows that listeners can flexibly allocate attention to specific, short intervals. This suggests that temporal attention is a viable mechanism for preferentially processing relevant segments in rapidly changing information streams, enhancing early sensory representations of attended stimuli.

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• attention selective divided