title: Auditory selective attention is enhanced by a task-irrelevant temporally coherent visual stimulus in human listeners.
abstract: 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.
authors: Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, United States.
authors: Ross K
authors: RK
authors: Maddox
authors: Ear Institute, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
authors: Huriye
authors: H
authors: Atilgan
authors: Ear Institute, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
authors: Jennifer K
authors: JK
authors: Bizley
authors: Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, United States.
authors: Adrian K C
authors: AK
authors: Lee
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D001519:Behavior; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008954:Models, Biological; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D010897:Pitch Discrimination; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D013997:Time Factors; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: auditory scene analysis; auditory-visual integration; human; multisensory; neuroscience; selective attention; temporal coherence
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