The audiovisual competition effect induced by temporal asynchronous encoding weakened the visual dominance in working memory retrieval

Converging evidence suggests a facilitation effect of multisensory interactions on memory performance, reflected in higher accuracy or faster response time under a bimodal encoding condition than a unimodal condition. However, relatively little attention has been given to the effect of multisensory competition on memory. The present study adopted an adaptive staircase test to measure the point of subjective simultaneity (PSS), combined with a delayed matched-to-sample (DMS) task to probe the effect of audiovisual competition during the encoding stage on subsequent unisensory retrieval. The results showed that there was a robust visual dominance effect and multisensory interference effect in WM retrieval, regardless of the subjective synchronous or subjective asynchronous audiovisual presentation. However, a weakened visual dominance effect was observed when the auditory stimulus was presented before the visual stimulus in the encoding period, particularly in the semantically incongruent case. These findings revealed that the prior-entry of sensory information in the early perceptual stage could affect the processing in the late cognitive stage to some extent, and supported the evidence that there is a persistent advantage for visuospatial sketchpad in multisensory WM.