When cross-modal attention fails

There is now convincing evidence that an involuntary shift of spatial attention to a stimulus in one modality can affect the processing of stimuli in other modalities, but inconsistent findings across different paradigms have led to controversy. Such inconsistencies have important implications for theories of cross-modal attention. The authors investigated why orienting attention to a visual event sometimes influences responses to subsequent sounds and why it sometimes fails to do so. They examined visual-cue-on-auditory-target effects in two paradigms--implicit spatial discrimination (ISD) and orthogonal cuing (OC)--that have yielded conflicting findings in the past. Consistent with previous research, visual cues facilitated responses to same-side auditory targets in the ISD paradigm but not in the OC paradigm. Furthermore, in the ISD paradigm, visual cues facilitated responses to auditory targets only when the targets were presented directly at the cued location, not when they appeared above or below the cued location. This pattern of results confirms recent claims that visual cues fail to influence responses to auditory targets in the OC paradigm because the targets fall outside the focus of attention.