TY - JOUR
T1 - The role of attention on the integration of visual and inertial cues
AU - Berger, Daniel R.
AU - Bülthoff, Heinrich H.
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgments This work was supported by the Max Planck Society and the Sonderforschungsbereich 550 of the Deutsche Fors-chungsgemeinschaft (DFG). We would like to thank Massimiliano Di Luca, John Butler, Jean-Pierre Bresciani and Jennifer Campos for helpful discussions.
PY - 2009/9
Y1 - 2009/9
N2 - The extent to which attending to one stimulus while ignoring another influences the integration of visual and inertial (vestibular, somatosensory, proprioceptive) stimuli is currently unknown. It is also unclear how cue integration is affected by an awareness of cue conflicts. We investigated these questions using a turn-reproduction paradigm, where participants were seated on a motion platform equipped with a projection screen and were asked to actively return a combined visual and inertial whole-body rotation around an earth-vertical axis. By introducing cue conflicts during the active return and asking the participants whether they had noticed a cue conflict, we measured the influence of each cue on the response. We found that the task instruction had a significant effect on cue weighting in the response, with a higher weight assigned to the attended modality, only when participants noticed the cue conflict. This suggests that participants used task-induced attention to reduce the influence of stimuli that conflict with the task instructions.
AB - The extent to which attending to one stimulus while ignoring another influences the integration of visual and inertial (vestibular, somatosensory, proprioceptive) stimuli is currently unknown. It is also unclear how cue integration is affected by an awareness of cue conflicts. We investigated these questions using a turn-reproduction paradigm, where participants were seated on a motion platform equipped with a projection screen and were asked to actively return a combined visual and inertial whole-body rotation around an earth-vertical axis. By introducing cue conflicts during the active return and asking the participants whether they had noticed a cue conflict, we measured the influence of each cue on the response. We found that the task instruction had a significant effect on cue weighting in the response, with a higher weight assigned to the attended modality, only when participants noticed the cue conflict. This suggests that participants used task-induced attention to reduce the influence of stimuli that conflict with the task instructions.
KW - Attention
KW - Cue conflicts
KW - Multisensory integration
KW - Perception of angular displacement
KW - Robust integration
KW - Self-motion perception
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=69549127992&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s00221-009-1767-8
DO - 10.1007/s00221-009-1767-8
M3 - Article
C2 - 19350230
AN - SCOPUS:69549127992
SN - 0014-4819
VL - 198
SP - 287
EP - 300
JO - Experimental Brain Research
JF - Experimental Brain Research
IS - 2-3
ER -