Abstract
Individual variability in performance on selective attention tasks that require top-down control can be large. Recent work also suggests that auditory spatial selective attention engages the same fronto-parietal network used by visual spatial selective attention; however, the brain regions that process visual and auditory sensory input are quite differently organized. We hypothesized that despite these dissimilarities, individual differences in performance would correlate between visual and auditory selective attention tasks, and that electroencephalography (EEG) measures, namely event-related potential (ERP) N1 responses and inter-trial phase coherence (ITC) peaks, would correspond to attention performance. We collected EEG while subjects sustained selective attention at a cued spatial location (left or right) and reported its visual or auditory sequence while ignoring a distractor sequence. Behavioral performance on the tasks was correlated across sensory modalities. At the group level, spatial attention modulated N1 and ITC peak responses for both auditory and visual tasks. At the individual level, the degree of N1 modulation correlated with task performance for the auditory but not the visual task, while ITC peak modulation correlated with performance for the visual but not the auditory task. Our work supports the idea of a shared fronto-parietal attention network, while highlighting differences in how to best measure the effects of top-down attention in these two sensory modalities.