Attention modulates audiovisual binding only for low-coherence stimuli, not salient ones

Evidence

Experiment B shows that attentional mechanisms may intervene at the level of single audiovisual sources in an audiovisual speech scene, selectively increasing or decreasing the amount of fusion depending on the coherence of the attended source. Interestingly, attention intervened only for “Video sentences”. Our interpretation is that binding could be pre-attentive for syllables, because of their salient audiovisual comodulations making them pop out as strong bottom-up audiovisual primitives. In contrast, since the coherence of AV sentences is low, the attentional focus could enhance audiovisual top-down schemas increasing binding. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 5137

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: whether salience-driven pre-attentive binding at the syllable level is a general principle of audiovisual scene analysis.

Related

• High-coherence stimuli bind pre-attentively while low-coherence ones need attention. (similarity 0.95)
• Syllables have stronger audiovisual coherence than sentences, predicting greater binding. (similarity 0.95)
• Audiovisual context coherence strengthens perceptual binding of speech syllables (similarity 0.95)
• Voluntary attention modulates how audiovisual contexts affect subsequent fusion (similarity 0.88)
• Selective attention modulates fusion only for low-coherence video sentence contexts. (similarity 0.87)
• Syllable speech binds audio and video more strongly than sentences do (similarity 0.86)
• Temporal coherence of audiovisual signals predicts how strongly vision captures auditory perception. (similarity 0.86)
• Stronger temporal audiovisual coherence increases visual weight in binding (similarity 0.86)
• Top-down instructional attention modulates audiovisual speech perception in unimpaired listeners (similarity 0.83)
• Attentional focus instructions can be experimentally manipulated to shift audiovisual integration during speech perception. (similarity 0.83)
• Exposure to low-coherence audiovisual contexts reduces subsequent multisensory fusion (similarity 0.82)
• Syllabic speech produces far stronger audio-visual correlation than sentences do (similarity 0.82)
• Directed attention only boosts audiovisual integration for sentence-level contexts (similarity 0.81)
• A coherence index computed before fusion decides whether audiovisual inputs bind (similarity 0.81)
• Syllable stimuli show far higher audiovisual correlation than sentences do (similarity 0.81)