Multisensory Decision-Making Under Urgent Conditions

Abstract

The choice of where to look next in our environment is driven by both the involuntary attraction of particular stimulus features and the willful ability to act in accordance with one’s behavioral goals. The quick interaction of stimulus-driven and goal-directed modes of attention happens on a rapid scale, hundreds of thousands of times per day, in order to execute these decisions. Using a multisensory urgent choice saccadic paradigm, CMD, we were able to evaluate the influences of these forms of attention on saccadic choices when presented with stimuli from different modalities. Spatial manipulations allowed us to assess individual differences in attentional filtering (when stimuli were spatially incongruent) and the influence of cue integration on improved task performance (when stimuli were spatially congruent). Incongruent task variants revealed the relative timing at which the different sensory signals influenced performance, especially for fast exogenously driven responses. Congruent task variants showed evidence of multisensory cue integration and its involvement in the improvement of the speed of top-down goal-driven processes. These findings reveal a great diversity in how multisensory signals interact to impact urgent choice perceptual decisions.