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Abstract

Whilst driving, we attend to the road to ensure that we stay on it. Nonetheless, unexpected events might demand our immediate attention instead; for instance, the sudden appearance of collision hazards or jaywalkers along the road. As we approach such objects, they loom, which is to say that they increase in retinal size. Also, they might emit looming sounds, which increase in loudness. Our brains respond preferentially to looming stimuli; past research has primarily focused on multisensory integration or crossmodal influences. In my talk, I will present our investigations on how looming sounds could influence visual attention in steering environments. The first study was performed in a driving simulator whereby we found that looming sounds promoted faster braking times to the unexpected appearance of collision objects, relative to comparable sounds. EEG analyses revealed that differences in the activity of BA6 underlie this performance benefit, suggesting that looming sounds heighten arousal and preparatory activity for braking responses. In a second study, we show that auditory looming cues resulted in faster discrimination of peripheral visual targets during a continuous visuo-motor steering. EEG analyses suggested two complementary networks of preferential activity for looming over static auditory cues (BA23, BA19, and BA7) and for static over looming auditory cues (BA8, BA45, and BA10). Respectively, they suggest that looming cues promote voluntary spatial orienting and experience less inhibition in prioritising this over the primary steering task. To sum, looming sounds help us to attend appropriately to objects that we might collide with during steering.