Visual Orienting Attention was Influenced by Auditory Processing

Visual orienting is critical signal to ability of attention. In particular, eye gaze is one of important visual orienting to refer our belief, desires and feeling etc. However, in real life, visual orienting has been indicated to be influenced by others modality processing, such as auditory supplement. Less previous studies have been comprehensively investigated how visual orienting is influenced by auditory processing. In this study, the authors conduct two experiments to investigate how visual orienting effect would be influenced by auditory processing, when used nonsocial and social stimuli as cues respectively (i.e., arrow and eye gaze). The results indicate that visual orienting is clearly influenced by auditory processing in both social and non-social stimuli as cues. Functional MRI data suggest that DLPFC plays an important role in regulating visual and auditory attention.