抄録
Previous studies have shown that the onset of a stimulus captures exogenous attention to its modality, and affects the processing of a subsequent stimulus. Turatto et al. (2002) used detection tasks for visual and auditory modalities and revealed that nonspatial attention could shift from one modality to the other. The present study investigated these attentional shifts in discrimination task. The time course of discriminative judgment varied depending on whether or not nonspatial attention needed to be endogenously shifted to another modality. In particular, the benefit in discrimination was obtained with longer stimulus onset asynchrony when cue and target stimuli were presented in different modalities than in the same modality. These results suggest that it is time consuming to shift nonspatial attention from one modality to another.
