**** Please ignore previous submissions - this is the correct one ***

Authors: Daniel Rogers, Simon Dobbyn, Paul McDonald, Henry J. Rice, Carol O’Sullivan & Fiona N. Newell


Crossmodal influences in spatial perception have been well documented in recent years. While there has been much research into the visual effects on sound localization (e.g ventriloquist effect), relatively little is known about how sound can affect visual localization in a scene. Moreover, very little is known about how sounds can influence attentional deployment during a visual search task. Here we investigated whether sound can affect visual search performance when the target is a dynamic object embedded in a dynamic display. In Experiment 1, participants had to judge whether a visual target was present or absent in a display containing varying number of distractor items. Auditory information was either congruent, incongruent with the moving direction of the visual target, or sound was absent. In Experiment 2, participants conducted an odd-one-out task in a similar dynamic display but here sound was either congruent or incongruent with the intermittent appearance of the visual target in the display (or sound was absent). In both experiments, we found that sound significantly affected visual search performance. Furthermore, explicit instructions to either ignore or attend to the sound had no effect on the overall findings. However, in Experiment 1 in particular, sound information did not facilitate the detection of the visual target directly but seemed instead to be used to facilitate multi-object tracking in order to eliminate non-target objects during the search process. Our findings suggest that sound can affect visual search in dynamic displays and have important implications for our understanding of multisensory influences target detection in realistic scenes.