The Differing Impact of Multisensory and Unisensory Integration on Behavior

Pooling and synthesizing signals across different senses often enhances responses to the event from which they are derived. Here, we examine whether multisensory response enhancements are attributable to a redundant target effect (two stimuli rather than one) or if there is some special quality inherent in the combination of cues from different senses. To test these possibilities, the performance of animals in localizing and detecting spatiotemporally concordant visual and auditory stimuli was examined when these stimuli were presented individually (visual or auditory) or in cross-modal (visual–auditory) and within-modal (visual–visual, auditory–auditory) combinations. Performance enhancements proved to be far greater for combinations of cross-modal than within-modal stimuli and support the idea that the behavioral products derived from multisensory integration are not attributable to simple target redundancy. One likely explanation is that whereas cross-modal signals offer statistically independent samples of the environment, within-modal signals can exhibit substantial covariance, and consequently multisensory integration can yield more substantial error reduction than unisensory integration.