Identifying audiovisual benefits in discrete head and arm localization tasks within an echoic environment

Abstract

Although the roles of visual and haptic cues in motor tasks have been well studied, the benefits of audio cues in complex motor tasks have been underexplored. Audiovisual cues reduce reaction times and decrease the variance of endpoint responses in simple head-orienting localization tasks. The aim of this research is to explore the potential of audiovisual stimuli for motor tasks performed in a real-life environment. Participants performed simple head and arm localization tasks in an echoic room. Comparing audiovisual stimuli to unimodal stimuli, a decrease in reaction times was observed. For head responses, reaction times were reduced on average by 58 ms for visual stimuli and 35 ms for auditory stimuli. For arm responses, reaction times showed a decrease of 30 ms on average for both unimodal conditions. Likewise, we noted decreased endpoint variance in audiovisual responses in comparison to unimodal auditory responses. Moreover, we observed a modality-effector dependency in the weighting of auditory and visual signals in the audiovisual responses. These results show the potential of audiovisual stimuli for real-life applications in motor tasks.