Effects of Experience, Training and Expertise on Multisensory Perception: Investigating the Link between Brain and Behavior

The ability to successfully integrate information from different senses is of paramount importance for perceiving the world and has been shown to change with experience. We first review how experience, in particular musical experience, brings about changes in our ability to fuse together sensory information about the world. We next discuss evidence from drumming studies that demonstrate how the perception of audiovisual synchrony depends on experience. These studies show that drummers are more robust than novices to perturbations of the audiovisual signals and appear to use different neural mechanisms in fusing sight and sound. Finally, we examine how experience influences audiovisual speech perception. We present an experiment investigating how perceiving an unfamiliar language influences judgments of temporal synchrony of the audiovisual speech signal. These results highlight the influence of both the listener's experience with hearing an unfamiliar language as well as the speaker's experience with producing non-native words.