Behavioral evidence for visually dominant audiovisual motion integration

Accurate motion perception is crucial for navigating complex environments, where sensory information is often derived from multiple modalities. While multisensory cues improve performance in tasks involving stationary stimuli, the integration of dynamic motion cues is less understood. Here, we examined the nature of auditory and visual motion integration and determined whether attentional instructions modulate integration. Sixty participants performed direction discrimination tasks under auditory, visual, and audiovisual conditions, with cueing instructions to attend to one or both modalities. Results showed that visual motion direction estimates were more reliable than auditory ones, and audiovisual estimates were superior to either modality alone. Additionally, visual motion estimates were more stable that auditory motion estimates during direction conflict trials. Reliability-weighted models of integration closely predicted audiovisual performance, demonstrating optimal integration. Sensory dominance (visual vs. auditory) influenced sensitivity to audiovisual motion, with visual dominant participants performing better overall. Our results demonstrate that the perception of audiovisual motion is dominated by vision and is shaped by top-down attention.