Abstract
Which one, ‘looking without seeing’ or ‘listening without hearing’, is more effective? There have been ongoing debates on the direction of sensory dominance in the case of cross-modal distraction. In the present study, we assumed that the specific direction of sensory dominance depends on the locus of attentional selection. Visual dominance may occur at the earlier stages while auditory dominance may occur at the later stages of cognitive processing. In order to test this hypothesis, we designed the present two (modality attended) by three (cross-modal congruency) experiment. Participants were asked to attend to either visual or auditory modality while ignore stimuli from the other modality during bimodal (visual and auditory) stimulation. More importantly, we explicitly differentiated the cross-modal distraction into the pre-response and the response level by manipulating three levels of cross-modal congruency: congruent, incongruent response-ineligible (II), and incongruent response-eligible (IE). Our behavioural data suggested that visual distractors caused more interferences to auditory processing than vice versa at the pre-response level while auditory distractors caused more interferences to visual processing than vice versa at the response level, indicating visual dominance at the pre-response level while auditory dominance at the response level. At the neural level, dissociable neural networks were also revealed. The default mode network of the human brain underlies visual dominance at the pre-response level, while the prefrontal executive regions, left posterior superior temporal sulcus and left inferior occipital cortex underlie auditory dominance at the response level.