Schedule of Events | Symposia

Sketchpad Series

The Path of Attention: Automaticity and Effort, Concept and Percept in Multimodal Visual Search Tasks

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Alessandra Sardina¹; ¹Edgewood College

Numerous studies have shown that cues from multiple sensory modalities can facilitate attention. The purpose of this study is to explore the dynamics of visual attention during a multimodal visual search task that differs based on the type of association (automatic or effortful) and type of object-location pairing (conceptual or perceptual). In the automatic association condition, the target audiovisual objects were paired to location based on conceptual features, for example, the sound and image of a bird at the top of the screen, or perceptual features, for example, a circle and an upward swoop sound on the top of the screen. For the effortful association condition, the object-location pairs were trained. This is a 2 x 2 within-groups design in which we used eye tracking to measure visual path and reaction time to find the target audiovisual object among other visual objects. Automatic associations resulted in a longer reaction time and a longer average visual path (mean = 2.2 fixations) than the effortful associations (mean = 1.85 fixations) (F = 212.34, p<0.001). Conceptual pairs resulted in longer reaction time and a longer average visual path (mean = 2.74 fixations) than perceptual pairs (mean = 1.3 fixations) (F = 49.64, p< 0.01), especially during the effortful association condition (F = 9.64, p < 0.001). Overall, these findings contribute to the understanding of how different kinds of multi-modal information can shape attention and highlight the idea that effortful training can be an effective strategy to modify attention.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Multisensory