A novel task and methods to evaluate inter-individual variation in audio-visual associative learning

learning audio-visual associations is foundational to a number of real-world skills, such as reading acquisition or social communication. characterizing individual differences in such learning has therefore been of interest to researchers in the field. here, we present a novel audio-visual associative learning task designed to efficiently capture inter-individual differences in learning, with the added feature of using non-linguistic stimuli, so as to unconfound language and reading proficiency of the learner from their more domain-general learning capability. by fitting trial-by-trial performance in our novel learning task using simple-to-use statistical tools, we demon- strate the expected inter-individual variability in learning rate as well as high precision in its estimation. we further demonstrate that such measured learning rate is linked to working memory performance in Italian- speaking (N = 58) and french-speaking (N = 51) adults. finally, we investigate the extent to which learning rate in our task, which measures cross-modal audio-visual associations while mitigating familiarity confounds, predicts reading ability across participants with different linguistic backgrounds. the present work thus introduces a novel non-linguistic audio-visual associative learning task that can be used across languages. In doing so, it brings a new tool to researchers in the various domains that rely on multi- sensory integration from reading to social cognition or socio-emotional learning.