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Previous studies have separately found that exogenous orienting decreases multisensory integration (MSI), while endogenous orienting enhances MSI. It is currently unclear, however, why the two orientations have opposite effects on MSI. In the current study, we investigated the interaction between spatial attention and MSI in two experiments based on the cue–target paradigm. Experiment 1 separated exogenous and endogenous orienting to investigate the effect of spatial attention on MSI by varying the predictability of the cue. Experiment 2 further explored the effect of endogenous orienting on MSI. We found that exogenous orienting induced by the directionality of the cue decreased MSI, while endogenous orienting induced by the predictability of the cue enhanced MSI. The role of spatial orienting need and spatial attention bias in the modulation of MSI by exogenous and endogenous orienting was discussed. The present study sheds new light on how spatial attention modulates MSI processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we investigate how exogenous and endogenous orienting of spatial attention affect visuospatial working memory (VSWM). Specifically, we focused on two attentional effects and their consequences on storage in VSWM, when exogenous (Experiment 1) or endogenous (Experiment 2) orienting cues were used. The first effect, known as the meridian effect, is given by a decrement in behavioural performance when spatial cues and targets are presented in locations separated by vertical and/or horizontal meridians. The second effect, known as the distance effect, is given by a decrement in the orienting effects as a function of the spatial distance between cues and targets. Our results revealed a dissociation between exogenous and endogenous orienting mechanisms in terms of both meridian and distance effects. We found that meridian crossing affects performance only when endogenous cues were used. Specifically, VSWM performance with endogenous cueing depended more on the number of meridian crossings than on distance between cue and target. By contrast, a U-shaped distance dependency was observed using exogenous cues. Our findings therefore suggest that exogenous and endogenous orienting mechanisms lead to different forms of attentional bias for storage in VSWM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]