Developments in virtual environment technology are enabling the rapid generation of systems that provide synthetic visual and auditory displays. The successful use of this technology in education, training, entertainment, and various other applications relies to a great extent on the effective combination of visual and auditory information. Little is known about the basic interactions between the auditory system and the visual system in real environments or virtual environments. Therefore, the purpose of the current study was to begin to assess the effectiveness of various combinations of visualauditory information in supporting the performance of a common task (detecting targets) in a virtual environment.