Attentional orienting across the sensory modalities Durk Talsma a, * , Albert Kok b , Heleen A. Slagter b,c , Giuseppe Cipriani b a Cognitive Psychology Department, Vrije Universiteit, Van den Boechorststraat 1, 1081BT Amsterdam, The Netherlands b Psychonomics Department, Universiteit van Amsterdam, The Netherlands c Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA Accepted 27 April 2007 Available online 5 June 2007 Abstract This event-related potential study investigated (i) to what extent incongruence between attention-directing cue and cued target modal- ity affects attentional control processes that bias the system in advance to favor a particular stimulus modality and (ii) to what extent top- down attentional control mechanisms are generalized for the type of information that is to be attended. To this end, both visual and auditory word cues were used to instruct participants to direct attention to a specific visual (color) or auditory (pitch) stimulus feature of a forthcoming multisensory target stimulus. Effects of cue congruency were observed within 200 ms post-cue over frontal scalp regions and related to processes involved in shifting attention from the cue modality to the modality of the task-relevant target feature. Both directing visual attention and directing auditory attention were associated with dorsal posterior positivity, followed by sustained fron- to-central negativity. However, this fronto-central negativity appeared to have an earlier onset and was more pronounced when the visual modality was cued. Together the present results suggest that the mechanisms involved in deploying attention are to some extent determined by the modality (visual, auditory) in which attention operates, and in addition, that some of these mechanisms can also be affected by cue congruency. Ó 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Multisensory; Intermodal attention; Switch; EEG; Cueing task 1. Introduction Selective attention enables us to focus our awareness on those aspects of the external environment that are relevant to our immediate goals. Recent studies (Corbetta & Shul- man, 2002; Hopfinger, Woldorff, Fletcher, & Mangun, 2001; Nobre, 2001) have shown that when subjects are pre-cued to selectively deploy attention, a network of dor- sal frontal and parietal brain areas prepares the system for upcoming task-relevant input, by way of a three-stage pro- cess (Foxe, Simpson, Ahlfors, & Saron, 2005; Giesbrecht & Mangun, 2005; Woldorff et al., 2004). First, the attention- directing cue stimulus must be interpreted. Then, attention must be selectively deployed to the cued feature, initiating an anticipatory biased state. Once attention is directed, this biased state must be maintained until the imperative stim- ulus is presented and processed. Such anticipatory states bias the system in advance to favor certain stimuli over others, resulting in more efficient resolving of relevant stim- ulus features (LaBerge, 1995). Attention can be voluntary oriented in advance to stim- uli based upon their location in space (i.e., spatial atten- tion) or a specific non-spatial feature such as a color or texture (i.e., non-spatial attention), but also lead the system to favor one sensory modality over another sensory modal- ity (i.e., intermodal attention). Advance knowledge of behaviorally relevant visual and auditory stimulus charac- teristics has been found to facilitate early sensory process- ing in the brain (Heinze et al., 1994; Jancke, Mirzazade, & Shah, 1999), indicating that both the auditory system and the visual system can be biased in a top-down manner. A central question in the study of selective attention is whether the mechanisms that control attentional orienting 0278-2626/$ - see front matter Ó 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.bandc.2007.04.005 * Corresponding author. Fax: +31 20 598 89 71. E-mail address: d.talsma@psy.vu.nl (D. Talsma). www.elsevier.com/locate/b&c Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Brain and Cognition 66 (2008) 1–10