Auditory selective attention is enhanced by a task-irrelevant temporally coherent visual stimulus in human listeners

• Published in: eLife Vol. 4
• Main Authors: Maddox, Ross K, Atilgan, Huriye, Bizley, Jennifer K, Lee, Adrian K C
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England eLife Sciences Publications Ltd 05.02.2015; eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation; Adolescent; Adult; Animal behavior; Attention - physiology; Auditory Perception - physiology; auditory scene analysis; auditory-visual integration; Behavior; Cross-modal; Female; Humans; Listening; Male; Models, Biological; multisensory; Neuroscience; Noise; Perceptions; Photic Stimulation; Pitch Discrimination; selective attention; Sensorimotor integration; Sensory integration; Streams; Task Performance and Analysis; temporal coherence; Time Factors; University colleges; Visual stimuli; Young Adult; temporal coherence; auditory scene analysis; neuroscience; multisensory; human; selective attention; auditory-visual integration
• ISSN: 2050-084X; 2050-084X
• DOI: 10.7554/eLife.04995

In noisy settings, listening is aided by correlated dynamic visual cues gleaned from a talker's face-an improvement often attributed to visually reinforced linguistic information. In this study, we aimed to test the effect of audio-visual temporal coherence alone on selective listening, free of linguistic confounds. We presented listeners with competing auditory streams whose amplitude varied independently and a visual stimulus with varying radius, while manipulating the cross-modal temporal relationships. Performance improved when the auditory target's timecourse matched that of the visual stimulus. The fact that the coherence was between task-irrelevant stimulus features suggests that the observed improvement stemmed from the integration of auditory and visual streams into cross-modal objects, enabling listeners to better attend the target. These findings suggest that in everyday conditions, where listeners can often see the source of a sound, temporal cues provided by vision can help listeners to select one sound source from a mixture.