Jamal Williams¹ (), Yong Hoon Chung², Jonathan Keefe¹, Viola Stoermer²; ¹University of California San Diego, ²Dartmouth College

Salient events in our environment rapidly capture attention, enabling reliable processing of relevant information. However, evidence is mixed regarding whether this exogenous attention operates similarly when cue and target information originate from distinct sensory modalities; with some work suggesting that endogenous (volitional) components of attention may be necessary when sounds cue attention towards locations in space (e.g., Mondor & Amirault, 1998; but see Mcdonald & Hillyard, 2000). In this work we explore how external cues affect visual processing within (visual) and between (auditory) modalities. In Experiment 1, participants determined the orientation of a rapidly presented, masked Gabor following exogenous cues at one of two peripheral locations from either visual (white circle) or auditory (pink noise burst from externally mounted speakers) modalities. Even though these cues were spatially non-predictive of the target location, for validly cued locations, both visual and auditory cues improved sensitivity (d') and response times (visual: both p < .001; auditory: p = .01 & p < .001). In Experiment 2, we increased the possible target locations to investigate how these effects might be modulated by greater spatial distances and inherently lower cue validity (from 50 to 25%)—conditions that should reduce any strategic deployment of endogenous attention. We replicated the cuing effects, showing only modest, and similar,reductions across experiments for visual (Cohen's dz = 1.51 vs 1.24, Exp 1 vs 2) and auditory (dz = 0.94 vs 0.99) cues. In Experiment 3, we track the time course of these cuing effects and find unique characteristics for both auditory and visual cues. Taken together, these results suggest that exogenous spatial attention operates through similar mechanisms regardless of sensory modality and supporting models of exogenous attention that incorporate direct crossmodal links rather than requiring voluntary attentional control.