One's experience of shifting attention from the color to the smell to the act of picking a flower seems like a unitary process applied, at will, to one modality after another. Yet, the unique and separable experiences of sight versus smell versus movement might suggest that the neural mechanisms of attention have been separately optimized to employ each modality to its greatest advantage. Moreover, addressing the issue of universality can be particularly difficult due to a paucity of existing cross-modal comparisons and a dearth of neurophysiological methods that can be applied equally well across disparate modalities. Here we outline some of the conceptual and methodological issues related to this problem and present an instructive example of an experimental approach that can be applied widely throughout the human brain to permit detailed, quantitative comparison of attentional mechanisms across modalities. The ultimate goal is to spur efforts across disciplines to provide a large and varied database of empirical observations that will either support the notion of a universal neural substrate for attention or more clearly identify the degree to which attentional mechanisms are specialized for each modality.

一个人将注意力从颜色转移到气味再到采摘花朵的行为的体验似乎是一个统一的过程，随意地应用于一种又一种的形态。然而，视觉、嗅觉和运动的独特且可分离的体验可能表明，注意力的神经机制已被单独优化，以充分利用每种模式的最大优势。此外，由于缺乏现有的跨模式比较以及可以同样适用于不同模式的神经生理学方法，解决普遍性问题可能特别困难。在这里，我们概述了与该问题相关的一些概念和方法论问题，并提出了一个实验方法的指导性示例，该实验方法可以广泛应用于整个人脑，以允许对跨模式的注意力机制进行详细、定量的比较。最终目标是刺激跨学科的努力，提供一个大型且多样化的经验观察数据库，该数据库将支持注意力的通用神经基础的概念，或更清楚地确定注意力机制针对每种模式的专门化程度。