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 in situations in which the orienting of a person's spatial attention in one sensory modality (such as vision) results in a concomitant shift of attention in one or more of his or her other sensory modalities (such as audition or touch) to the same location (or object) at the same time. The central question for researchers interested in cross-modal attention concerns how the brain's attentional resources are coordinated or linked between the senses to select just that subset of information that is relevant to a person's current goals from among the abundance of multisensory information impinging on the various sensory receptors at any one time. This entry describes coordination of attentional resources, attentional selection research, mapping of cross-modal links, and future research directions