Audiovisual Integration in Adults: Using a Dynamic Task to Measure Differences in Temporal Binding Windows Across Stimuli

Being able to integrate information from multiple sensory modalities, such as hearing and sight, is essential for everyday functioning. The temporal binding window (TBW) refers to how out of synch these two modalities can be before they are considered asynchronous. In the current study a new method to measure the TBW of audiovisual stimuli with varying social and linguistic contents was developed. Participants manually adjusted the soundtrack of a video by varying increments until it was synchronous to the visual information (toward-synch) or asynchronous (from-synch). The newly developed task with increments of 50ms produced the smallest TBW compared to all other versions of the task and to a commonly used method. Smaller windows were found for speech stimuli compared to both non-social and non-speech ones, and for adjustments toward-synch versus from-synch. Giving participants the ability to control the soundtrack proved to be a superior methodology over prior commonly used ones.