Attentional blink suppresses both stimulus-driven and representation-driven cross-modal spread of attention

Previous studies have shown that visual attention effect can spread to the task-irrelevant auditory modality automatically through either the stimulus-driven binding process or the representation-driven priming process. Using an attentional blink paradigm, the present study investigated whether the long-latency stimulus-driven and representation-driven cross-modal spread of attention would be inhibited or facilitated when the attentional resources operating at the post-perceptual stage of processing are inadequate, whereas ensuring all visual stimuli were spatially attended and the representations of visual target object categories were activated, which were previously thought to be the only endogenous prerequisites for triggering cross-modal spread of attention. The results demonstrated that both types of attentional spreading were completely suppressed during the attentional blink interval but were highly prominent outside the attentional blink interval, with the stimulus-driven process being independent of, whereas the representation-driven process being dependent on, audiovisual semantic congruency. These findings provide the first evidence that the occurrences of both stimulus-driven and representation-driven spread of attention are contingent on the amount of post-perceptual attentional resources responsible for the late consolidation processing of visual stimuli, whereas the early detection of visual stimuli and the top-down activation of the visual representations are not the sole endogenous prerequisites for triggering any types of cross-modal attentional spreading.

Automated summary

The study found that both stimulus-driven and representation-driven attention spreading processes are completely suppressed during the attentional blink interval but occur prominently outside of it, with the stimulus-driven process being independent of audiovisual semantic congruency and the representation-driven process being dependent on it. These results suggest that the occurrence of attention spreading processes in cross-modal tasks is contingent on the availability of post-perceptual attentional resources for late consolidation processing of visual stimuli, rather than just early detection and top-down activation of visual representations.