Visual cues help listeners follow conversation in a complex acoustic environment. Many audiovisual research studies focus on how sensory cues are combined to optimize perception, either in terms of minimizing the uncertainty in the sensory estimate or maximizing intelligibility, particularly in speech understanding. From an auditory perception perspective, a fundamental question that has not been fully addressed is how visual information aids the ability to select and focus on one auditory object in the presence of competing sounds in a busy auditory scene. In this chapter, audiovisual integration is presented from an object-based attention viewpoint. In particular, it is argued that a stricter delineation of the concepts of multisensory integration versus binding would facilitate a deeper understanding of the nature of how information is combined across senses. Furthermore, using an object-based theoretical framework to distinguish binding as a distinct form of multisensory integration generates testable hypotheses with behavioral predictions that can account for different aspects of multisensory interactions. In this chapter, classic multisensory illusion paradigms are revisited and discussed in the context of multisensory binding. The chapter also describes multisensory experiments that focus on addressing how visual stimuli help listeners parse complex auditory scenes. Finally, it concludes with a discussion of the potential mechanisms by which audiovisual processing might resolve competition between concurrent sounds in order to solve the cocktail party problem
