Multisensory distractor processing is modulated by spatial attention

To respond to multisensory information, inputs from different sensory modalities must be processed and combined. Recently, overt spatial attention was shown to be a crucial factor modulating the processing of irrelevant audiovisual multisensory stimuli. Here, we investigate the processing of task-irrelevant visuotactile features in a multisensory flanker interference task incorporating visuotactile target and distractor stimuli. The congruency between the target and distractor features was varied orthogonally. Across three experiments, overt spatial attention and the spatial separation between the distractor and the target were varied systematically. When fixating the distractor, the processing of the visual and tactile distractor features was not independent. Manipulating overt spatial attention as well as the spatial separation between the target and distractor impacted multisensory distractor processing. These results are consistent with those approaches emphasizing the role of attention in multisensory processing specifically in relation to the cognitive load or selection difficulty of the task situation