The role of crossmodal semantic interactions in real-world visuo-spatial attention
- Autores: Daria Kvasova
- Directores de la Tesis: Salvador Soto-Faraco (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Pompeu Fabra ( España ) en 2020
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Emiliano Macaluso (presid.), Andreas Mädebach (secret.), Jordi Navarra Ordoño (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Biomedicina por la Universidad Pompeu Fabra
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TDX
- Resumen
In my thesis, I was investigating how semantic information shared between modalities affect spatial orienting.
The impact of cross-modal links for attention orienting to spatial and temporal cues has been widely described. Despite some previous studies have revealed an impact of crossmodal sematic correspondences, the results are mixed with regard to the conditions in which audiovisual semantic congruence can influence attention orienting. Furthermore, the vast majority of the research on crossmodal semantics used simple, stereotyped displays that are far from achieving ecological validity. In my thesis, I try to bring the research of the topic to a more ecologically valid context. In our everyday life we must effectively orient attention to relevant objects and events in multisensory environments. However, real-life scenarios provide a rich web of semantic information through the different sensory modalities. The present thesis attempts to close this gap by addressing the role of identity-based crossmodal relationships on attention orienting in scenarios closer to real-world conditions. To this end, the experiments presented here attempt to extrapolate and generalize previous findings in more realistic environments by using naturalistic and dynamic stimuli, and address the theoretical questions of task relevance and perceptual load.
In my thesis, I used behavioural and eye-tracking methods in order to address research questions.
The outcome of the three empirical studies in this thesis lead to several conclusions. First, that the effect of audio-visual semantic congruence on attention is not strictly automatic. Instead, they suggest that some top-down processing is necessary for audio-visual semantic congruence to trigger spatial orienting. The second conclusion to emerge is that crossmodal semantic congruence can guide attention under goal-directed conditions in visual search, and also under free observation in complex and dynamic scenes. Third, that perceptual load is a limiting factor for these interactions.
These findings extend previous knowledge on object-based crossmodal interactions with simple stimuli and clarify how audio-visual semantically congruent relationships play out in realistic scenarios.
