Evaluating deployment of attentional resources to visual information by auditory evoked potentials

Abstract

An objective evaluation of the deployment of attentional resources to a visual task is required to develop better products and services. Here I introduce the task-irrelevant probe technique, which can evaluate the deployment of attentional resources to a visual task. In this technique, auditory probes are presented during a visual task and participants are asked to ignore them. The amplitudes of auditory evoked potentials elicited by the probes should decrease when participants deployed greater attentional resources to the visual task, because residual attentional resources that can be deployed to auditory probes would be reduced. A series of our experimental studies demonstrated that 1) deployment of attentional resources caused by pleasure can be evaluated independently from that caused by task difficulty, 2) the temporal resolution can be improved by using a multiple-stimulus paradigm, and 3) more detailed evaluation of the deployment of attentional resources is available by combining other physiological indices. The task-irrelevant probe technique is useful for both basic and applied studies.