Temporal disparity effects on audiovisual integration in low vision individuals

Our recent findings have shown that sounds improve visual detection in low vision individuals when the audiovisual pairs are presented simultaneously. The present study purports to investigate possible temporal aspects of the audiovisual enhancement effect that we have previously reported. Low vision participants were asked to detect the presence of a visual stimulus (yes/no task) either presented in isolation or together with an auditory stimulus at different SOAs. In the first experiment, when the sound was always leading the visual stimuli, there was a significant visual detection enhancement even when the visual stimulus was temporally delayed by 400 ms. However, the visual detection improvement was reduced in the second experiment when the sound could randomly lead or lag the visual stimulus. A significant enhancement was found only when the audiovisual stimuli were synchronized. Taken together, the results of the present study seem to suggest that high-level associations between modalities might modulate audiovisual interactions in low vision individuals.