Imagine attention as a fanciful dance, where the brain gracefully navigates between focusing on what it wants (top-down) and being captivated by what it sees (bottom-up). But how does our brain control this dance in the realm of perceiving through multiple senses? To shed light on this mystery, scientists created a powerful computer model that mimicked real neural networks involved in processing visual and auditory information. By simulating various memory tasks, the model produced results that aligned with actual experiments. It even generated predictions for future human studies to test! One fascinating discovery was that when one sensory modality took up more working memory space, distractions from the other modality decreased. The model offers a possible explanation for this phenomenon by suggesting the existence of a specific brain network. Dive into the research to understand how attention waltzes across our senses!

The spatiotemporal dynamics of the neural mechanisms underlying endogenous (top-down) and exogenous (bottom-up) attention, and how attention is controlled or allocated in intersensory perception are not fully understood. We investigated these issues using a biologically realistic large-scale neural network model of visual-auditory object processing of short-term memory. We modeled and incorporated into our visual-auditory object-processing model the temporally changing neuronal mechanisms for the control of endogenous and exogenous attention. The model successfully performed various bimodal working memory tasks, and produced simulated behavioral and neural results that are consistent with experimental findings. Simulated fMRI data were generated that constitute predictions that human experiments could test. Furthermore, in our visual-auditory bimodality simulations, we found that increased working memory load in one modality would reduce the distraction from the other modality, and a possible network mediating this effect is proposed based on our model.

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