Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Human information processing is constrained by limited attentional resources. A matter of ongoing debate inmultisensory research is whether attentional resources are shared or distinct across sensory modalities. Previous researchsuggested that the type of tasks that humans perform in separate sensory modalities determines whether attentional resourcesare shared or distinct across sensory modalities. Here, we investigated the relation between attentional resources and theperformed type of tasks in four experiments using a dual task paradigm. We found shared attentional resources for vision,haptics and audition when two purely spatial tasks were performed in separate sensory modalities (Experiment 1 & 2) whilewe found distinct attentional resources for the same sensory modalities when a spatial task was performed together with adiscrimination task (Experiment 3 & 4). Overall, our findings suggest that the distribution of attentional resources is operatingat a task-level independent of the involved sensory modalities.