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Abstract

Looming sounds that indicate an approaching object, e.g., those that grow louder with time, can enhance the visual processing of items that they accompany. This is often attributed to multisensory integration. Recently, we have demonstrated that looming sounds presented to one ear can also preferentially reorient spatial attention, away from a central manual tracking task to peripheral visual targets on the congruent side. Specifically, looming sounds induced a reaction time benefit for correctly discriminating the tilt of congruent targets that followed them, compared to static intensity sounds (Glatz & Chuang, 2019). Here, we report EEG results for this “looming benefit”. Visual targets that appear after a congruent looming sound induced larger ERP amplitudes at 159±30 ms and 280±30 ms that were more pronounced in the right hemisphere. Source localization analyses suggest that the earlier component (P159) is defined by a greater activity in the right cuneus, which is implicated in visual detection, and the later component (P280) by the right precuneus, which is implicated in spatial reorienting. Both components were also defined by less activity in frontal brain regions, e.g., orbitofrontal cortex, which suggests that ‘looming’ sounds reduced inhibition to interruptions to the manual tracking task.