From Sound to Sight: The Cross-Modal Spread of Location-Based Inhibition of Return.

Abstract

Previous research has demonstrated that visual selective attention can spread cross-modally to the task-irrelevant auditory modality. In the present study, we investigated whether location- and frequency-based inhibition of return (IOR) can extend from the auditory modality to the task-irrelevant visual modality using an exogenous cue-target paradigm coupled with electrophysiological recordings. The auditory cue was presented on the left or right speaker, and the auditory target, which appeared 300-500 ms after the cue, was presented at the same or different locations and frequencies. Visual stimuli presented either individually or simultaneously at the center of the screen were disregarded. The results revealed that the frontocentral late component (200-350 ms) in the extracted visual ERP difference waveforms (audiovisual minus auditory) was stronger at different cue-target locations than at the same locations, regardless of whether the cue-target frequency was the same or different. However, no significant differences were observed in the late component between cue-target same and different frequency conditions. These findings provide strong evidence that location-based IORs can spread cross-modally, whereas frequency-based IORs appear to remain modality specific. This pattern highlights the selective nature of auditory-to-visual attentional transfer, which is mediated by shared spatial representations and limited by feature-specific processing pathways. The current study provides a new perspective for understanding how auditory and visual modalities interact in attention processing.