The effect of audition on the deployment of visuo-spatial attention

Abstract

Vision is commonly accepted as being our most dominant sense. However, our everyday experience informs us that the world is not unisensory. Information from other senses can help us in searching for and identifying objects in our environment. The perceptual processes underpinning visual search have been studied extensively. This thesis investigated specifically the role of audition in attentional deployment on visuo-spatial tasks. Much of the literature in this area is centred around the visual search paradigm and the studies often incorporate basic low-level stimuli. In the present experiments, we used search tasks that incorporated multisensory stimuli in high-level scenes. The primary aim of this thesis was to further our understanding of how sound affects our ability to detect objects in our environment.