Attentional focus instructions can be experimentally manipulated to shift audiovisual integration during speech perception.

Evidence

The study included two consecutive experiments, Exp. A. followed by Exp. B (always in this order). In Exp. A, the participants were involved in a monitoring paradigm in which they were asked to constantly look at the screen and monitor for possible “ba” or “da” targets by pressing an appropriate key, as in Nahorna et al. ( 2012 , 2015 ). In Exp. B the monitoring “ba” vs. “da” task remained the same (with a different order of the 120 stimuli in the film), but in addition, specific instructions were given to participants, either to put more attention to syllables (“Attention syllables”) or to put more attention to sentences (“Attention sentences”). The order of the “Attention syllables” and “Attention sentences” conditions was counterbalanced between the participants. To increase the efficiency of the attentional demand, participants were informed that they would be questioned on the content of either the “syllables” or the “sentences” material at the end of the experiment. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 5158

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Nahorna et al. (2012, 2015) audiovisual monitoring paradigm and general selective-attention research on speech perception.