Multisensory information has been shown to modulate attention in infants and facilitate learning in
adults, by enhancing the amodal properties of a stimulus. However, it remains unclear whether this
translates to learning in a multisensory environment across middle childhood, and particularly in the
case of incidental learning. One hundred and eighty-one children aged between 6 and 10 years
participated in this study using a novel Multisensory Attention Learning Task (MALT). Participants
were asked to respond to the presence of a target stimulus whilst ignoring distractors. Correct target
selection resulted in the movement of the target exemplar to either the upper left or right screen
quadrant, according to category membership. Category membership was defined either by visual-only,
auditory-only or multisensory information. As early as 6 years of age, children demonstrated greater
performance on the incidental categorization task following exposure to multisensory audiovisual
cues compared to unisensory information. These findings provide important insight into the use of
multisensory information in learning, and particularly on incidental category learning. Implications
for the deployment of multisensory learning tasks within education across development will be
discussed
