Auditory–tactile presentation accelerates target detection in a multitasking situation

There is ample evidence from cognitive sciences and neurosciences studies that multisensory stimuli are detected better and faster than their unisensory counterparts. Yet, most of this work has been conducted in settings and with protocols within which participants had the sole detection task to perform. In realistic and complex environments, such as military ones, detection of critical information has to be performed while the operator is concurrently managing several others tasks and processing a vast amount of sensory inputs. To date, it remains to determine whether multisensory benefits for detection hold true in complex multitasking situations. In the present study, we compared the detection performance of healthy participants when the target was only auditory, only tactile, or both auditory and tactile. Detection performance was measured in a simple detection task condition and in a multitasking condition. In the latter, participants had to detect the targets while concurrently performing the subtasks of the MATB-II environment, designed in the 90s by NASA to simulate piloting tasks. Multisensory acceleration of reaction times was larger during multitasking compared to single-task conditions. Crucially, participants detected auditory-tactile targets faster than their unisensory counterparts. While previous studies have reported such facilitation effects in single-task contexts, our results show that multisensory facilitation of detection speed does occur in a realistic multitasking environment and is larger than in simple task conditions. Auditory-tactile displays seem to have the potential to enhance information presentation and could be used in applied settings like military aviation.