The Journal of Neurophysiology Vol. 85 No. 2 February 2001, pp. 1009-1012
Copyright ©2001 by the American Physiological Society

RAPID COMMUNICATION

Spatial Attention Modulates Sound Localization in Barn Owls

Institut für Biologie II, Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen, D-52074 Aachen, Germany

Johnen, Anja, Hermann Wagner, and Bernhard H. Gaese. Spatial Attention Modulates Sound Localization in Barn Owls. J. Neurophysiol. 85: 1009-1012, 2001. Attentional influence on sound-localization behavior of barn owls was investigated in a cross-modal spatial cuing paradigm. After being cued to the most probable target side with a visual cuing stimulus, owls localized upcoming auditory target stimuli with a head turn toward the position of the sound source. In 80% of the trials, cuing stimuli pointed toward the side of the upcoming target stimulus (valid configuration), and in 20% they pointed toward the opposite side (invalid configuration). We found that owls initiated the head turns by a mean of 37.4 ms earlier in valid trials, i.e., mean response latencies of head turns were reduced by 16% after a valid cuing stimulus. Thus auditory stimuli appearing at the cued side were processed faster than stimuli appearing at the uncued side, indicating the influence of a spatial-selective attention mechanism. Turning angles were not different when owls turned their head toward a cued or an uncued location. Other types of attention influencing sound localization, e.g., a reduction of response latency as a function of the duration of cue-target delay, could not be observed. This study is the first attempt to investigate attentional influences on sound localization in an animal model.