Schedule of Events | Symposia

Sketchpad Series

Investigating the mechanisms of multisensory divided attention in humans

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom
Also presenting in Data Blitz Session 2 - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm EDT, Independence Ballroom.

Samara Glazer¹ (samara.glazer10@gmail.com), Jared Newell¹, Lauren Wolters¹, James Howard¹; ¹Brandeis University

In complex natural environments, the ability to simultaneously attend to multiple sensory modalities and distinguish relevant information from irrelevant is essential for adaptive behavior. For example, making a decision about what to eat in a crowded street market may require attending to the sights, sounds, and smells of potential options. Divided attention tasks are an effective experimental model of multisensory processing. However, these tasks tend to utilize two modalities, and are almost exclusively limited to auditory and visual domains. The olfactory modality has received less focus in previous research despite being a significant part of daily sensory experience. Here we designed a study in which participants (n = 50) experienced simultaneous presentation of odors, visual images, and sounds in a multisensory divided attention task. On each trial, prior to stimulus presentation participants were cued to attend to one, two, or all three modalities, and then after stimulation probed on the specific identity of one of the attended modalities. We hypothesized that response time would increase and identification accuracy would decrease with an increasing number of attended sensory modalities in this task. Interestingly, we found that performance was significantly above chance in all attention conditions, with significantly decreased accuracy in any condition with olfactory attention. Additionally, the number of modalities attended did not have an impact on performance. These results indicate that humans have the capacity to simultaneously attend to auditory, visual, and olfactory information in multisensory conditions, with decreased accuracy for olfactory stimuli.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Multisensory