Visual Statistical Learning: Getting Some Help from the Auditory Modality

Presenting information to multiple sensory systems can (depending on conditions) either facilitate or hinder processing. The current study examined the effects of crossmodal presentation on statistical learning. The first experiment examined statistical learning within auditory and visual modalities, while using comparable experimental conditions across the two modalities. The findings suggest that the auditory modality was better suited for learning the temporal structure in the input. Experiments 2 and 3 examined whether the presence of auditory stimuli would facilitate or hinder visual statistical learning. The results suggest that auditory stimuli that share the same statistics as visual stimuli can facilitate the acquisition of visual sequences.