Abstract
Humans are highly effective at dealing with noisy, probabilistic information 1,2. One hallmark of this is Cue Combination: combining two independent noisy sensory estimates to increase precision beyond the best single estimate3-6. Surprisingly, this is not achieved until 10-12 years of age 7-12despite other multisensory skills appearing in infancy 13-17. It is unclear if this lack of integration before 10-12 years of age is due to maturation or experience with specific cues. The “experience” account predicts that adults learning new cues would fail to combine them for many years 18. Here we show, in contrast, that adults rapidly combine a novel audio cue akin to human echolocation19-21 with vision. Following two hours of training to judge distance using the novel echo cue, echo-naïve subjects were more precise given both cues together versus the best single cue. This ability also transferred to stimuli and reliability levels beyond those trained, showing learning beyond a simple decision rule with specific stimuli 22. These results indicate that humans develop general-purpose cue combination abilities as they mature. The discovery of people’s ability to immediately integrate new signals into their existing repertoire further suggests an optimistic outlook on substituting or augmenting human senses.