Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Category learning in the real world often relies on information from multiples senses, yet most studies of learning focus on a single modality. It is imperative to study multisensory learning not only to capture processes involved in naturalistic learning, but also because multisensory information may facilitate learning. In the current study, we examined how learning of audiovisual categories is impacted by presenting information simultaneously or separately across modalities. Overall, simultaneous presentation led to more successful performance, even when information was only presented in one modality. Simultaneous presentation also encouraged learners to attend more to the auditory modality. These findings suggest that simultaneous presentation of category information across different modalities can facilitate learning and that this may be related to how learners attend to information during learning. More broadly, these results demonstrate the necessity of investigating multisensory learning to reveal mechanisms supporting learning in more naturalistic multisensory contexts.