Costs and Benefits of Multisensory Category Learning

Our conceptual understanding of the world is based on information from multiple senses, yet most studies of how we learn novel categories focus on a single modality. It is imperative to study multisensory learning not only to capture processes involved in naturalistic learning, but also because multisensory contexts may impact how learners attend to and learn from information in different modalities. In the current study, we examined how novel category learning is impacted when information is presented in multiple modalities, with two main results. First, simultaneously presenting auditory and visual information led to better generalization to novel category items compared to presenting identical information separately within the same trial. Second, multisensory learning could be considered to be better than, worse than, or comparable to unisensory learning, depending on the metric of learning considered. Together, these findings suggest that the way multisensory information is encountered during training directly impacts learning and that presenting information together results in more flexible representations than presenting it separately. More broadly, these results demonstrate the necessity of investigating multisensory learning to reveal how attention and learning function in more naturalistic learning contexts.