Training listeners to detect auditory-visual temporal coherence enhances their ability to exploit visual information for auditory scene analysis

Listeners engaged in an auditory selective attention task are better able to report brief deviants in a target auditory stream when a task-irrelevant visual stimulus is coherently modulated with the target stream, than when it is coherent with the distractor stream (Maddox et al., 2015). Here, we demonstrate that learning to better discriminate auditory-visual temporal coherence, but not simple exposure to temporally coherent AV stimuli, enhances the ability of listeners to exploit visual information in this task. After 5 short training sessions listeners were able to benefit from auditory-visual temporal coherence both when the visual stimulus is temporally coherent with the target or with the distractor stream, relative to an independently modulated condition. These findings indicate that training to discriminate cross-modal temporal coherence fundamentally changes how listeners exploit visual information for auditory scene analysis.