Musical training reduces the Colavita visual effect

Abstract

Although it has been documented that musical training enhances multisensory integration, there is not yet a consensus as to how musical training influences the visual dominance effect in sensory dominance. The present study adopted the Colavita visual dominance paradigm, presenting auditory stimuli concurrent with visual stimuli, to investigate the visual dominance effect between music majors and nonmusic majors and compared the reaction time and response proportion of the two kinds of participants in the bimodal trials. The results showed that the proportion of simultaneous responses in bimodal trials of music majors is higher than that of nonmusic majors; the nonmusic majors show a greater difference between the proportion of “Visual-Auditory” trials and “Auditory-Visual” trials compared with the music majors; the ΔRT of the two responses of the nonsimultaneous bimodal trials of nonmusic majors is longer than that of music majors. The results indicated that musically trained individuals have an enhanced ability to bind visual and auditory information and show a lesser Colavita effect, that is, a reduced visual dominance effect, than their nonmusic major peers. We conclude that musical training extends beyond the field of vision or auditory domain, improves audiovisual integration, and reduces the visual dominance effect.