Nature 381, 66 - 68 (02 May 1996); doi:10.1038/381066a0

Enhancement of selective listening by illusory mislocation of speech sounds due to lip-reading

Jon Driver

Department of Psychology, Birkbeck College, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, UK

MECHANISMS of human attention allow selective processing of just the relevant events among the many stimuli bombarding our senses¹. Most laboratory studies examine attention within just a single sense, but in the real world many important events are specified multimodally, as in verbal communication. Speech comprises visual lip movements as well as sounds, and lip-reading contributes to speech perception, even for listeners with good hearing, by a process of audiovisual integration². Such examples raise the problem of how we coordinate our spatial attention across the sensory modalities, to select sights and sounds from a common source for further processing. Here we show that this problem is alleviated by allowing some cross-modal matching before attentional selection is completed. Cross-modal matching can lead to an illusion, whereby sounds are mislocated at their apparent visual source³; this crossmodal illusion can enhance selective spatial attention to speech sounds.