An irrelevant light enhances auditory detection in humans: a psychophysical analysis of multisensory integration in stimulus detection

A deafening flash! Visual interference of auditory signal detection

“…The target stimulus was a 300ms burst of white noise, which could be presented, after a delay of 150ms, in either one of the two stimulation intervals. This procedure ensured that there was no visual stimulation present during the auditory stimulation, while providing clear visual temporal markers bracketing each stimulation interval (similar to Lovelace et al, 2003). The participant had to indicate whether the target was in either the first or second interval, using left or right arrow keys respectively.…”

“…Experimental procedures and stimuli were programmed using Psychtoolbox for Matlab. Stimuli for each main task closely followed the methods described in the originating studies (Lovelace et al, 2003;Saenz & Koch, 2008). For the Sequence Discrimination task (Figure 1a), visual stimuli consisted of white circular discs of luminance 81cdm -2 , presented centrally on a black background.…”

“…Our second goal was therefore to probe the effects of visual stimulation on actual auditory signal detection, and measure the correlation of such effects with performance on Saenz & Koch's sequence discrimination paradigm. We measured sensitivity for detecting a white-noise burst, in the presence of an irrelevant and temporally non-predictive visual event (a high-contrast drifting radial grating), 6 compared to no visual stimulus (following Lovelace, Stein, & Wallace, 2003). We predicted that participants who benefitted from auditory-recoding of visual stimuli in the sequence discrimination task might be affected more by irrelevant flashes in the auditory signal detection task, because they would be experiencing concurrent visually-evoked auditory sensations.…”

Intersensory redundancy accelerates preverbal numerical competence

“…When given information that is redundant across multiple senses, nonhuman animals and humans tested on a wide variety of non-numerical dimensions have been shown to improve in accuracy and/or reaction time, relative to performance with unisensory stimuli (e.g., Bahrick and Lickliter, 2000;Gogate and Bahrick, 1998;Lewkowicz and Kraebel, 2004;Lickliter et al, 2002;Lovelace et al, 2003;Mellon et al, 1991;Meredith and Stein, 1983). For example, multimodal cues occurring together in time and space enhance responses of multisensory neurons in the superior colliculus of cats to a level above the responses evoked by unisensory cues; multisensory cues also produce behaviorally evident increases in cats' effectiveness at detecting, orienting towards, and approaching the cue as compared with responses to unimodal sensory cues (e.g., Meredith and Stein, 1983;Stein, Huneycutt, and Meredith, 1988).…”

“…For young human adults, presenting a light in conjunction with a sound enhances the ability to detect low-intensity sounds (Lovelace, Stein, and Wallace, 2003). Although in elderly adults sensory processes often deteriorate (e.g., Corso, 1971;Lichtenstein, 1992), multisensory presentation of stimuli has been shown to enhance discriminations.…”