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This psychophysics study used musicians as a model to investigate whether musical expertise shapes the temporal integration window for audiovisual speech, sinewave speech, or music. Musicians and non-musicians judged the audiovisual synchrony of speech, sinewave analogs of speech, and music stimuli at 13 audiovisual stimulus onset asynchronies (±360, ±300 ±240, ±180, ±120, ±60, and 0 ms). Further, we manipulated the duration of the stimuli by presenting sentences/melodies or syllables/tones. Critically, musicians relative to non-musicians exhibited significantly narrower temporal integration windows for both music and sinewave speech. Further, the temporal integration window for music decreased with the amount of music practice, but not with age of acquisition. In other words, the more musicians practiced piano in the past 3 years, the more sensitive they became to the temporal misalignment of visual and auditory signals. Collectively, our findings demonstrate that music practicing fine-tunes the audiovisual temporal integration window to various extents depending on the stimulus class. While the effect of piano practicing was most pronounced for music, it also generalized to other stimulus classes such as sinewave speech and to a marginally significant degree to natural speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To see whether there is a difference in temporal resolution of synchrony perception between audio–visual (AV), visuo–tactile (VT), and audio–tactile (AT) combinations, we compared synchrony–asynchrony discrimination thresholds of human participants. Visual and auditory stimuli were, respectively, a luminance-modulated Gaussian blob and an amplitude-modulated white noise. Tactile stimuli were mechanical vibrations presented to the index finger. All the stimuli were temporally modulated by either single pulses or repetitive-pulse trains. The results show that the temporal resolution of synchrony perception was similar for AV and VT (e.g., ~4 Hz for repetitive-pulse stimuli), but significantly higher for AT (~10 Hz). Apart from having a higher temporal resolution, however, AT synchrony perception was similar to AV synchrony perception in that participants could select matching features through attention, and a change in the matching-feature attribute had little effect on temporal resolution. The AT superiority in temporal resolution was indicated not only by synchrony–asynchrony discrimination but also by simultaneity judgments. Temporal order judgments were less affected by modality combination than the other two tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]