Attention: Cross-Modal

Attention refers to those processes that allow for the selective processing of incoming sensory stimuli, typically those that are most relevant to one's current goals or to the task at hand, or, alternatively, those that have the greatest intrinsic salience or biological significance. Attended stimuli tend to be processed both more thoroughly and more rapidly than are other potentially distracting (“unattended”) stimuli. Although research on attention has traditionally considered selection among the competing sensory inputs within just a single modality at a time (most often vision), the past two decades have seen a burgeoning of interest in the existence and nature of any cross-modal constraints on our ability to selectively attend to a particular object, location, or source of information.

The term cross-modal is typically used ...