Abstract：
Our experience of daily events is multisensory, such as seeing a barking dog chasing after a revving car. Signals across sensory modalities therefore need to be integrated in order to construct the most accurate perception of events, so we can take the most appropriate response. Multisensory integration mainly follows a temporal rule: stimuli presented at the same time will be integrated. In this talk I will present three series of research. In the first part, I will review studies of the facilitatory effects on visual perception elicited by the presentation of a simultaneous sound in adults. The possible mechanisms are examined and discussed. In the second part, I will demonstrate the typical developmental changes of audiovisual integration based on temporal synchrony in childhood. In the third part, I will present the importance of early visual experience in the first year of life for the later development of audiovisual integration. To do so, we took advantage of a rare population of adults who were born with dense cataracts in one eye or both eyes. The results will elucidate how brain and perceptual systems integrate visual and auditory information, and how they become tuned in an adult way.