Information across different senses can affect our behavior in both positive and
negative ways. Stimuli aligned with a target stimulus can lead to improved behavioral
performances, while competing, transient stimuli often negatively affect our task
performance. But what about subtle changes in task-irrelevant multisensory stimuli?
Within this experiment we tested the effect of the alignment of subtle auditory and
visual distractor stimuli on the performance of detection and discrimination tasks
respectively. Participants performed either a detection or a discrimination task on a
centrally presented Gabor patch, while being simultaneously subjected to a random
dot kinematogram, which alternated its color from green to red with a frequency of
7.5 Hz and a continuous tone, which was either a frequency modulated pure tone for the
audiovisual congruent and incongruent conditions or white noise for the visual control
condition. While the modulation frequency of the pure tone initially differed from the
modulation frequency of the random dot kinematogram, the modulation frequencies
of both stimuli could align after a variable delay, and we measured accuracy and
reaction times around the possible alignment time. We found increases in accuracy
for the audiovisual congruent condition suggesting subtle alignments of multisensory
background stimuli can increase performance on the current task