Retrospective auditory cues can improve detection of near-threshold visual targets

Recent studies have demonstrated that visually cueing attention towards a stimulus location after its disappearance can facilitate visual processing of the target and increase task performance. Here, we tested whether such retro-cueing effects can also occur across different sensory modalities, as cross-modal facilitation has been shown in pre-cueing studies using auditory stimuli prior to the onset of a visual target. In the present study, participants detected low-contrast Gabor patches in a speeded response task. These patches were presented in the left or right visual periphery, preceded or followed by a lateralized and task-irrelevant sound at 4 stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOA; −600 ms, −150 ms, +150 ms, +450 ms). We found that pre-cueing at the −150 ms SOA led to a general increase in detection performance irrespective of the sound’s location relative to the target. On top of this temporal effect, sound-cues also had a spatially specific effect, with further improvement when cue and target originated from the same location. Critically, the temporal effect was absent, but the spatial effect was present in the short-SOA retro-cueing condition (+150 ms). Drift-diffusion analysis of the response time distributions allowed us to better characterize the evidenced effects. Overall, our results show that sounds can facilitate visual processing, both pre- and retro-actively, indicative of a flexible and multisensory attentional system that underlies our conscious visual experience.