Audiovisual fusion and cochlear implant proficiency

Recent studies suggest that cochlear implant (CI) users have a typical, and perhaps improved, ability to fuse congruent multisensory information. The ability to fuse incongruent auditory and visual inputs, however, remains to be fully investigated.

Here, performance on a classical audiovisual task (the McGurk effect) was assessed in seventeen cochlear-implanted, postlingually deaf individuals with varied degrees of auditory competency.

In line with previous studies, our results revealed audiovisual fusion abilities that were within normal limits in CI users compared to normally-hearing (NH) participants. A different pattern of response emerged, however, when participants' responses were analyzed according to the degree of auditory proficiency with the CI. Although proficient CI users (pCI) and NH participants favoured auditory input when multisensory signals were not fused, only the non-proficient CI users (npCI) relied predominantly on visual cues to resolve audiovisual conflict. This pattern was found despite a similar percentage of fused percepts between pCI users, npCI users and NH participants.

These data show a remarkable level of similarity between pCI users and NH individuals in the perception of incongruent audiovisual information, suggesting that optimal auditory performance with the CI is associated with normal fusion of conflicting audiovisual input.