Audiovisual Integration During Joint Action: No Effects for Motion Discrimination and Temporal Order Judgment Tasks

In daily life, humans constantly process information from multiple sensory modalities (e.g., visual and auditory). Information across sensory modalities may (or may not) be combined to form the perception of a single event via the process of multisensory integration. Recent research has suggested that performing a spatial crossmodal congruency task jointly with a partner affects multisensory integration. To date, it has not been investigated whether multisensory integration in other crossmodal tasks is also affected by performing a task jointly. To address this point, we investigated whether joint task performance also affects perceptual judgments in a crossmodal motion discrimination task and a temporal order judgment task. In both tasks, pairs of participants were presented with auditory and visual stimuli that might or might not be perceived as belonging to a single event. Each participant in a pair was required to respond to stimuli from one sensory modality only (e.g., visual stimuli only). Participants performed both individual and joint conditions. Replicating earlier multisensory integration effects, we found that participants' perceptual judgments were significantly affected by stimuli in the other modality for both tasks. However, we did not find that performing a task jointly modulated these crossmodal effects. Taking this together with earlier findings, we suggest that joint task performance affects crossmodal results in a manner dependent on how these effects are quantified (i.e., via responses time or accuracy) and the specific task demands (i.e., whether tasks require processing stimuli in terms of location, motion, or timing).