ABSTRACT
The majority of studies showing multisensory attention benefits have focused on brief audiovisual events. Here we examined whether attention benefits can occur for auditory and visual signals that change in synchrony over time. In the first two experiments, we found no evidence that attention was captured more by synchronous compared to asynchronous audiovisual and visual looming signals. The results of our third experiment suggested that attention was not preferentially oriented towards synchronous compared to asynchronous audiovisual and visual looming signals. In the fourth experiment, we found no evidence for better sustained attention for synchronous compared to asynchronous audiovisual looming and unisensory signals. Together, these findings indicate that synchronous multisensory looming signals are not always prioritised by our information processing system. Future multisensory research should focus on more conceptual clarity and deepen our understanding of the specific stimulus, task and contextual features affecting the strength and quality of multisensory integration.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Lulu Wang for her feedback on this manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Data availability statement
The data, experiment and analysis code used in this study are available on figshare (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.9980570.v1).