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In everyday experience we are exposed to complex stimuli that impact sensorial receptors in more than one sensory modality. For example, human social interactions through language necessarily imply integration of auditory information with visual information referring to facial expression and gesture. In such a context, selective attention seems to operate favoring some of those stimuli on the basis of preexisting contextual information and physical or psychological salience, among other criteria. Although most studies of attentional mechanisms are still conducted using stimulation of a single sensory modality, which allows simpler hypothesis testing and minimizes confounding factors, in the last decade we have witnessed great developments in the study of so-called crossmodal attention. Evidence has accrued that both conflicting and congruent information presented to different sensory modalities interferes or influences the processing at each modality at different levels. Behavioral and electrophysiological studies support the existence of early crossmodal integration between almost all sensory modalities and stable crossmodal plasticity as a long-term effect. In this context, event-related potentials have been extensively used, especially owing to some advantages that this technique offers for the study of attentional mechanisms, such as its high temporal resolution. Attentional modulation of event-related potentials elicited by crossmodal stimuli partially resembles what has been described using monomodal stimulation. For example, an early negativity named "Nd" increases its amplitude when the eliciting stimulus is attended. In the present chapter, we attempt to revise the most recent developments in this cutting-edge research area and their implications for the theoretical framework in which we understand attention and attentional processes.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-70573-4_6

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