The impact of attentional demands on audiovisual integration depends on task-specific components.

Research investigating how attentional demands impacts audiovisual (AV) integration has used a variety of multisensory tasks and procedures to manipulate attentional demands, leading to very differing results. Also, the secondary tasks used to increase attentional demands draw on the sensory modalities already being investigated; for example, a visual distracter task may be used to increase attentional demands in an audiovisual integration task. It is therefore not clear whether the additional task interfered with sensory processing or with audiovisual integration.