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Auditory spatial attention is a specific form of attention, involving the focusing of auditory perception to a location in space. Although the properties of visuospatial attention have been the subject of detailed study, relatively less work has been done to elucidate the mechanisms of audiospatial attention. Spence and Driver note that while early researchers investigating auditory spatial attention failed to find the types of effects seen in other modalities such as vision, these null effects may be due to the adaptation of visual paradigms to the auditory domain, which has decreased spatial acuity. Recent neuroimaging research has provided insight into the processes behind audiospatial attention, suggesting functional overlap with portions of the brain previously shown to be responsible for visual attention. ==Behavioral evidence== Several studies have explored the properties of visuospatial attention using the behavioral tools of cognitive science, either in isolation or as part of a larger neuroimaging study. Rhodes sought to identify whether audiospatial attention was represented analogically, that is, if the mental representation of auditory space was arranged in the same fashion as physical space. If this is the case, then the time to move the focus of auditory attention should be related to the distance to be moved in physical space. Rhodes notes that previous work by Posner,〔Posner, M. I. (1978). Chronometric Explorations of Mind. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawerence Erlbaum Associates.〕 among others, had not found behavioral differences in an auditory attention task that merely requires stimulus detection, possibly due to low-level auditory receptors being mapped tonotopically rather than spatially, as in vision. For this reason, Rhodes utilized an auditory localization task, finding that the time to shift attention increases with greater angular separation between attention and target, although this effect reached asymptote at locations more than of 90° from the forward direction. Spence and Driver,〔 noting that previous findings of audiospatial attentional effects including the aforementioned study by Rhodes could be confounded with response-priming, instead utilized several cuing paradigms, both exogenous and endogenous, over the course of 8 experiments. Both endogenous (informative) and exogenous (un-informative) cues increased performance in an auditory spatial localization task, consistent with the results previously found by Rhodes. However, only endogenous spatial cues improved performance on an auditory pitch discrimination task; exogenous spatial cues had no effect on the performance of this non-spatial pitch judgement. In light of these findings, Spence and Driver suggest that exogenous and endogenous audiospatial orientating may involve different mechanisms, with the colliculus possibly playing a role in both auditory and visual exogenous orienting, and the frontal and parietal cortex playing a similar part for endogenous orienting. It is noted that the lack of orientation effects to pitch stimuli for exogenous spatial cuing may be due to the connectivity of these structures, Spence and Driver note that while frontal and parietal cortical areas have inputs from cells coding both pitch and sound location, colliculus is only thought to be sensitive to pitches above 10 kHz, well above the ~350 Hz tones used in their study. Diaconescu et al.〔Diaconescu, A.O., Alain, C., & McIntosh, A.R. (In Press). Modality-dependent “What” and “Where” Preparatory Processes in Auditory and Visual Systems. ''Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience,'' In Press.〕 found participants of their cross-modal cuing experiment to respond faster to the spatial (location of visual or auditory stimulus) rather than non-spatial (shape / pitch) properties of target stimuli. While this occurred for both visual and auditory targets, the effect was greater for targets in the visual domain, which the researchers suggest may reflect a subordination of the audiospatial to visuospatial attentional systems. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Auditory spatial attention」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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