Date of Award

Spring 2026

Abstract

Category learning allows people to group complex sensory input into categories, helping them generalize knowledge from familiar exemplars to novel stimuli. In everyday life, categories are often learned from more than one sense, yet most prior work on category learning has focused on learning in a single sensory modality. Here, we asked whether the way category information is presented across modalities, simultaneously or separately, shapes multisensory category learning in adults. In Experiment 1, participants learned the categories with either simultaneous or separate presentation of auditory and visual information and then completed a test phase to assess not only whether they learned but how they used each modality in their categorization decisions. Separate and simultaneous training performance was similar, but at test, those who learned from simultaneous presentation were more accurate overall and demonstrated evidence of a bias to rely on auditory information in their categorization decisions. In Experiment 2, we demonstrated that this auditory bias and generalization advantage were driven by presentation timing rather than by differences in total stimulus duration. By independently manipulating presentation timing and duration, we showed that longer exposure improved training accuracy but did not eliminate the auditory bias or the simultaneous advantage at test. Across both experiments, simultaneous presentation resulted in stronger reliance on auditory information and greater flexibility when presentation format changed, whereas separate presentation encouraged more balanced use of both modalities but resulted in lower overall generalization and reduced performance across presentation formats that differed from training. Together, these findings suggest that the temporal structure of multisensory input shapes attentional allocation during learning and flexibility of category representations.

Document Type

Master's Thesis

First Advisor

Casey L Roark

Second Advisor

Michelle D Leichtman

Third Advisor

Jill A McGaughy

Degree Name

Master of Arts

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