The ability to use temporal relationships between cross-modal cues facilitates perception and behavior. Previously we observed that temporally correlated changes in the size of a visual stimulus and the intensity in an auditory stimulus influenced the ability of listeners to perform an auditory selective attention task (Maddox, Atilgan, Bizley, & Lee, 2015). Participants detected timbral changes in a target sound while ignoring those in a simultaneously presented masker. When the visual stimulus was temporally coherent with the target sound, performance was significantly better than when the visual stimulus was temporally coherent with the masker, despite the visual stimulus conveying no task-relevant information. Here, we trained observers to detect audiovisual temporal coherence and asked whether this changed the way in which they were able to exploit visual information in the auditory selective attention task. We observed that after training, participants were able to benefit from temporal coherence between the visual stimulus and both the target and masker streams, relative to the condition in which the visual stimulus was coherent with neither sound. However, we did not observe such changes in a second group that were trained to discriminate modulation rate differences between temporally coherent audiovisual streams, although they did show an improvement in their overall performance. A control group did not change their performance between pretest and post-test and did not change how they exploited visual information. These results provide insights into how crossmodal experience may optimize multisensory integration.

使用跨模式线索之间的时间关系的能力有利于感知和行为。之前我们观察到视觉刺激大小和听觉刺激强度的时间相关变化会影响听众执行听觉选择性注意任务的能力（Maddox、Atilgan、Bizley 和 Lee，2015）。参与者检测目标声音中的音色变化，同时忽略同时呈现的掩蔽器中的音色变化。当视觉刺激与目标声音在时间上一致时，尽管视觉刺激没有传达与任务相关的信息，但性能明显优于视觉刺激与掩蔽器在时间上一致时的性能。在这里，我们训练观察者检测视听时间一致性，并询问这是否改变了他们在听觉选择性注意任务中利用视觉信息的方式。我们观察到，训练后，相对于视觉刺激与声音都不相干的情况，参与者能够受益于视觉刺激与目标流和掩蔽流之间的时间连贯性。然而，我们没有在第二组中观察到这种变化，该组接受了训练以区分时间相干视听流之间的调制率差异，尽管它们确实显示出整体性能的提高。对照组没有改变他们在测试前和测试后的表现，也没有改变他们利用视觉信息的方式。这些结果提供了关于跨模式体验如何优化多感官整合的见解。