Extending the study of visual attention to a multisensory world (Charles W. Eriksen Special Issue)

Charles W. Eriksen (1923–2018), long-time editor of Perception & Psychophysics (1971–1993) – the precursor to the present journal – undoubtedly made a profound contribution to the study of selective attention in the visual modality. Working primarily with neurologically normal adults, his early research provided both theoretical accounts for behavioral phenomena as well as robust experimental tasks, including the well-known Eriksen flanker task. The latter paradigm has been used and adapted by many researchers over the subsequent decades. While Eriksen’s research interests were primarily focused on situations of unimodal visual spatially selective attention, here I review evidence from those studies that have attempted to extend Eriksen’s general approach to non-visual (i.e., auditory and tactile) selection and the more realistic situations of multisensory spatial attentional selection.