Optimal integration of auditory and vibrotactile information for judgments of temporal order.

Recent research that assessed spatial judgments about multisensory stimuli suggests that humans integrate multisensory inputs in a statistically optimal manner by weighting each input by its normalized reciprocal variance. Is integration similarly optimal when humans judge the temporal properties of bimodal stimuli? Twenty-four participants performed temporal order judgments (TOJs) about 2 spatially separated stimuli. Stimuli were auditory, vibrotactile, or both.