Audition is accepted as more reliable (thus dominant) than vision when
temporal discrimination is required by the task. However, it is not
known whether the characteristics of the visual stimulus, for example
its familiarity to the perceiver, affect auditory dominance. In this
study we manipulated familiarity of the visual stimulus in a
well-established multisensory phenomenon, i.e., the sound-induced flash
illusion. This illusion occurs when, for example, one brief visual
stimulus (e.g., a flash) is presented in close temporal proximity with
two brief sounds; participants perceive two flashes instead of one. We
found that when the visual stimuli (faces or buildings) were familiar,
participants were less susceptible to the illusion than when they were
unfamiliar. As the illusion has been ascribed to early cross-sensory
interactions between vision and audition, the present work offers
behavioural evidence that high level processing of objects'
characteristics such as familiarity, affects early temporal multisensory
integration. Possible mechanisms underlying the effect of familiarity
are discussed. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.