Temporal attention shortens perceptual latency: a temporal prior entry effect.

The prior entry hypothesis of attention holds that attended stimuli are perceived earlier than unattended stimuli. Whereas this speeding of perceptual processing has been repeatedly demonstrated for spatial attention, it has not been reported within the temporal domain. To fill this gap, we tested whether temporal attention accelerates auditory perceptual processing by employing event-related potentials as on-line indicators of perceptual processing. In a modified oddball paradigm, we presented a single tone in each trial, either a frequent standard tone or an infrequent deviant or target tone. Temporal attention to tones was manipulated via constant foreperiods. We observed that the latency of the N2, an event-related potential reflecting perceptual processing, is shortened by temporal attention. This result provides first evidence for the idea that temporal attention accelerates perceptual processing as suggested by the prior entry hypothesis.