Saccades operate a continuous selection between competing targets at different locations. This competition has been mostly investigated in the visual context, and it is well known that a visual distractor can interfere with a saccade toward a visual target. Here, we investigated whether multimodal, audio-visual targets confer stronger resilience against visual distraction. Saccades to audio-visual targets had shorter latencies than saccades to unisensory stimuli. This facilitation exceeded the level that could be explained by simple probability summation, indicating that multisensory integration had occurred. The magnitude of inhibition induced by a visual distractor was comparable for saccades to unisensory and multisensory targets, but the duration of the inhibition was shorter for multimodal targets. We conclude that multisensory integration can allow a saccade plan to be reestablished more rapidly following saccadic inhibition.
Keywords: Multisensory integration; Race model analysis; Saccadic inhibition; Visual distractors.