Perceived Quality in Game Audio - Game Sound Technology and Player Interaction: Concepts and Developments - page 164

tactile modality was taking longer than shifting
from the auditory or visual modality. These results
show that performance not only depends on what
actually happens, but also on what is anticipated
by a game player. Yet, it must also be noted that in
this study a faster response time for the most likely
modality was always related to priming from an
event in the same modality on the previous trial,
and not to the expectancy as such.
Alais and Blake (1999) have found evidence
that attention focused on a visual object markedly
amplifies neural activity produced by features of
the attended object. They applied single-cell and
neuroimaging studies and reinforce that visual at-
tention modulates neural activity in several areas
within the visual cortex. They state that “attentional
modulation seems to involve a boost in the gain of
responses of cells to their preferred stimuli, not a
sharpening of their stimulus selectivity” (p. 1015).
These findings clearly indicate that the per-
ceptual process is actually controlled by attention.
They can not fully answer the question whether
there is one multi-modal attention or whether at-
tentions are associated with modalities. However,
there are indicators that favor the latter.

result in selective perception (concept of gating or
early selection ) or in selective behavior (resource
allocation or late selection ). Most importantly,
she argues that the choice of mechanism actually
applied depends on the perceptual load. At low
perceptual load, irrelevant information continues
to be processed—early selection fails and late
selection becomes necessary. When the perceptual
load is high, irrelevant information is not processed
and resource allocation is no longer needed. She
cites a number of experimental studies that sup-
port these conclusions: processing of distractors
ceases when the perceptual capacity is exhausted.
Interestingly, Lavie claims that distractor
processing depends on perceptual capacity limits,
rather than on limited information contained in
the relevant stimuli. This makes the MLE model
second-rank in importance: In the MLE model,
limited information contained in the relevant
stimuli should entail the processing of additional
cues among the distractors to check for reliability
of that limited information and the correctness of
its interpretation. Following Lavie, this is either
not possible when the perceptual load is high, or
attention needs to be shifted to formerly irrelevant
information.

Divided Attention and
Perceptual capacity Limits

PErcEPtUAL sALIENcE
AND sALIENcE MODEL One of these indicators is that capacity limits

appear to be more severe when multiple stimuli
are presented in the same modality compared
with multiple modalities (Pashler, 1999; Reiter,
Weitzel, and Cao, 2007; Reiter & Weitzel, 2007;
Reiter, 2009). This means that capacity limits may
occur earlier and more frequently if the main task
and the so-called distractors (stimuli that are not
directly related to the task/the direct focus of at-
tention) are located in the same modality.
In an overview article, Lavie (2001) examines
the capacity limits in selective attention. Lavie
reasserts and concludes what evidence from
several studies suggests: that selective attention
as discussed in the previous section can either

Landragin, Bellalem, and Romary (2001) suggest
that in the absence of information about the his-
tory of an interactive process, a (visual) object can
be considered salient when it attracts the user's
visual attention more than the other objects. This
definition of salience originally valid for the visual
domain can easily be extended to what might be
called multi-modal salience , meaning that:

• certain properties of an object attract the

user's general attention more than the other
properties of that object