Temporal expectation is a process by which people use temporally structured sensory information to explicitly or implicitly predict the onset or duration of future events. Temporal Expectation has been shown to influence responses to stimuli in visual, auditory, and tactile modalities, but less is known about the effects of temporal expectation on crossmodal processing. Because timing plays an important role in crossmodal interaction, we investigated how temporal expectation influenced auditory-visual interaction, using an auditory-visual congruity effect as a measure of crossmodal interaction. On each trial, participants received a modality cue indicating whether a target letter, B or D, would be presented auditorily or visually. The task was to identify the letter in the cued modality as rapidly and as accurately as possible. Each target was simultaneously accompanied by either a congruent or an incongruent letter presented through the other modality. Temporal expectation was block-wise manipulated by varying the relative probability of a stimulus appearing at a short or long interval after the modality cue. In the short-interval-expected block, the short interval was used 80% of the time and the long interval was used 20% of the time. In the long-interval-expected block, the probabilities were reversed. For auditory identification, an incongruent visual stimulus produced stronger interference when the bimodal stimulus was presented with expected than with unexpected timing. In contrast, for visual identification, an incongruent auditory stimulus produced weaker interference when the bimodal stimulus was presented with expected than with unexpected timing. The fact that temporal expectation made visual distracters more potent and visual targets less susceptible to auditory interference suggests that temporal expectation increases perceptual weight on visual signals.
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