The role of attention in audio-visual integration

The importance of sensory integration in everyday experience becomes clear when considering special populations with sensory integration dysfunction. This differs from previous approaches, which asked participants to rate the duration of the note and the level of agreement between the gesture and the note. This modification is an important precursor to testing ASD individuals who often have trouble shifting cognitive set. This new procedure differs from previous work by using a task that explicitly calls attention to the gesture's length when judging tone duration. This serves as an important precursor to our subsequent investigations of audio-visual integration amongst children with autism. It also explores whether the illusion is robust to manipulations of attention, which will provide further insight into an illusion at odds with the otherwise widely-accepted theory of optimal integration.