HERE’S a situation: You’re driving toward an unknown location with the navigation system as your guide, and the music is turned on in your car the whole journey.
As you approach the lane to your destination, you turn down the music so you can see better.
Sounds are heard with our ears, while looking for things, we use our eyes for. Why then do we, sometimes, turn the noise down when we want to see better?
Do sounds affect our vision?
Verdict:
TRUE
Studies have found that loud noises can indeed affect how we see things.
Research has shown that our senses are quite interconnected. This phenomenon is called sensory integration, where one sense can influence another.
A study by Jamal Williams and his colleagues at UC San Diego investigated whether naturalistic sounds can influence how ambiguous objects are perceived.
The researchers created silhouette morphs between four pairs of objects: a cat and a kettle, a plane and a raven, a hammer and a seal, and a goat and a Vespa.
In the first experiment, the researchers tested whether presenting a sound consistent with one of the morph categories (e.g. a cat's meow) while an ambiguous object was slowly revealed (e.g. a morph between a cat and a kettle) would lead participants to categorise the ambiguous object as more cat-like (compared to presenting a kettle's whistle or an unrelated sound).
When asked to recreate the observed ambiguous object using a slider, participants were significantly biased to produce an object more similar to the sound-congruent category (i.e. producing a more cat-like morph) than the sound-incongruent category.
What this basically means is that people integrate auditory information when performing visual recognition.
Understanding this auditory-visual link helps explain why special effects in movies are so impactful or why a thunderous applause can make a performance seem even more spectacular.
It also shows us how our brains process sensory information, which can have practical applications in everything from virtual reality to designing more effective alarms.
References:
1. https://www.
