Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Multisensory integration tolerates limited temporal misalignment between multisensory signals, often characterised as a temporal window of integration (TWI). This study explores whether TWI size is influenced by perceived causal impressions, and whether auditory cues within the TWI can increase causal impressions when visual evidence is ambiguous. Results showed that launching and strong interaction conditions produced wider TWIs than weak conditions. Critically, this widening was directionally asymmetric: stronger causal conditions selectively expanded the post-contact integration window while leaving pre-contact tolerance unchanged, consistent with a forward causal prediction account. In the weak condition, near-synchronous sounds selectively increased causal and contact judgments. The finding of a close relationship between simultaneity, causal, and contact judgments supports a common inferential process that integrates multisensory evidence to estimate a shared cause.