Visual and auditory cues to attention: The effect of visual attentional focus on frequency selectivity

An experiment was carried out to determine whether visual cues to attention could affect frequency selectivity. The 19 participants each completed baseline thresholds for auditory and visual stimulus discrimination. Visual thresholds were defined by contrast while auditory thresholds were defined by sound to noise ratio. Participants then had their accuracy tested in both auditory and visual discrimination tasks under different auditory and visual cue conditions. In order to demonstrate cuing effects crossmodally the experiment worked on the assumption that visual attention could be focused through the use of cues, and that auditory attention could be focused onto limited frequency bands using auditory cues. Visual results indicated that visual cues to attention could improve performance on visual discrimination tasks in line with prior research. However, auditory results failed to show noteworthy frequency selectivity effects. Auditory results did show a marginal interaction however, suggesting that visual cues to attention may affect frequency selectivity. Future research is needed to clarify these findings with greater statistical power.