Psychology News
A team of researchers empirically tested the mental activity related to the dictum “hearing is believing”. The study is published in the journal Psychological Science.
The Study
In order to understand how can sound affect visual perception, the researchers conducted a series of experiments. In each experiment, participants were shown a morphed image of two objects and played sounds related or unrelated to the target morph. They were then tested on how much they could recognize the objects from the sounds.
The Findings
The results revealed that audio cues can alter our visual perception, besides helping us recognize objects more quickly.
One of the lead authors, Jamal R. Williams, elaborated: “Your brain spends a significant amount of energy to process the sensory information in the world and to give you that feeling of a full and seamless perception. One way that it does this is by making inferences about what sorts of information should be expected.”
To Know More You May Refer To
Williams, J. R., Markov, Y. A., Tiurina, N. A., & Störmer, V. S. (2022). What You See Is What You Hear: Sounds Alter the Contents of Visual Perception. Psychological science, 33(12), 2109–2122. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976221121348