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The effect of different sensory modalities on inattentional blindness in a virtual environment for attentional loss improvement

Failure to notice salient objects even looking directly at them happens when individuals' attention is preoccupied, known as inattentional blindness (IB). As a form of attentional loss, IB occurrence might cause severe outcomes due to limited cognitive resources. Varied methods have been explored to reduce the IB effect and avoid neglect of critical information. Attenuating attentional loss via aided guidance with different sensory modalities intervention could be a possible way to address this issue. This study investigates how different sensory modalities affect the cognitive performance and IB effect from behaviour and neural changes in the human brain and how could we apply this in attention training for attentional loss improvement. Two experimental sessions were conducted, with a multisensory oddball task designed in virtual reality (VR) as the main task to attract individuals' attention. In session 1, participants responded to the main task without being informed of the unexpected task-irrelevant patterns in the background, while in session 2, they were informed of the unexpected patterns but still attended to the main task. Thus, participants were divided into IB (unaware of the pattern) and Aware (aware of the pattern) groups based on their awareness of patterns in the first session. Our results revealed that this VR-based design successfully induced the IB occurrence, with four out of nine participants reporting being unaware of the unexpected patterns. Further, the multisensory oddball task showed better performance in cross-modal stimuli (visual-auditory, VA) with higher accuracy and shorter reaction time than in uni-modal (A or V) conditions. Interestingly, in session 1, the IB group showed better performance than the Aware group, indicating that the IB group was not distracted during the task since they were unaware of the patterns. These findings supported our aims to explore the impact of different sensory modalities on cognitive performance and provided a potential solution to attenuate attentional loss via manipulating the attentional set with different stimuli modalities.