Eide Neurolearning Blog: Voluntary Control of Attention - Visual and Auditory Multi-Tasking
There is a yin and yang effect between visual and auditory attention. When one is looking, then auditory processing areas go down, and when one is listening, then visual processing areas go down. Mixed visual-auditory stimuli have an underadditive effect, so that if you have to do both at the same time, total brain activation goes down, and interestingly, language processing becomes more left hemisphere-dominant.