When audition dominates vision: evidence from cross-modal statistical learning

Presenting information to multiple sensory modalities sometimes facilitates and sometimes interferes with processing of this information. Research examining interference effects shows that auditory input often interferes with processing of visual input in young children (i.e., auditory dominance effect), whereas visual input often interferes with auditory processing in adults (i.e., visual dominance effect). The current study used a cross-modal statistical learning task to examine modality dominance in adults. Participants ably learned auditory and visual statistics when auditory and visual sequences were presented unimodally and when auditory and visual sequences were correlated during training. However, increasing task demands resulted in an important asymmetry: Increased task demands attenuated visual statistical learning, while having no effect on auditory statistical learning. These findings are consistent with auditory dominance effects reported in young children and have important implications for our understanding of how sensory modalities interact while learning the structure of cross-modal information.