Williams and teammates studied how things heard influence perceptions of what’s seen. They share that “Visual object recognition is not performed in isolation but depends on prior knowledge and context. Here, we found that auditory context plays a critical role in visual object perception. . . . we demonstrated across two experiments . . . that the representations of ambiguous visual objects were shifted toward the visual features of an object that were related to the incidental sound. . . . these effects were driven by the continuous integration of audiovisual inputs during perception itself. Together, our results demonstrate that the perceptual experience of visual objects is directly shaped by naturalistic auditory context, which provides independent and diagnostic information about the visual world.”
Jamal Williams, Yuri Markov, Natalia Tiurina, and Viola Stormer. “What You See is What You Hear: Sounds Alter the Contents of Visual Perception.” Psychological Science, in press, https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976221121348
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.