The Effect Of Endogenous Spatial Attention On The Colavita Visual Dominance Effect

Although streams of information from multiple sensory modalities often simultaneously reach us,our brain does not give euqal weight to different modalities.Visual information dominates the other sensory modalities more frequently,especially when spatial information is involved.One intriguing example of the dominance of visual over audition is the Colavita effect,which refers to the phenomenon that participants often report the visual than auditory component of an audiovisual stimulus.Previous studies have shown that endogenous spatial attention influences the multisensory integration,the Colavita visual dominance effect is one of the dominant effects of multisensory integration,and whether it still influenced by endogenous spatial attention is still unknown,so cue-target paradigm was used to explore the effect of endogenous spatial attention on the Colavita visual dominance effect.In the experiment one,we used endogenous visual spatial cues(the central arrow cues that predict with high probability the spatial location of the target)to examine the difference of the Colavita effect between the cued and uncued position.Results showed that the magnitude of the Colavita effect was significantly larger in the cued position.In the experiment two,we used endogenous auditory spatial cues(the semantically meaningful sounds “right” or “left”)to examine the difference of the Colavita effect between the cued and uncued position.Results showed that the magnitude of the Colavita effect was significantly larger in the uncued position.The results demonstrated:1)exists the asymmetries in cross-modal spaial attention orienting between visual and auditory;2)the influences of endogenous spatial attention on the Colavita visual dominance effect depends on the modality of cues.